Human Nature and Public Policy: An Evolutionary Approach

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Human Nature and Public Policy

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Human Nature and Public Policy: An Evolutionary Approach Edited by

Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson

HUMAN NATURE AND PUBLIC POLICY

© Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson, 2003. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6116–6 hardback ISBN 1–4039–6285–5 paperback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Human nature and public policy: an evolutionary approach/edited by Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1–4039–6116–6 — ISBN 1–4039–6285–5 (alk. Paper) 1. Policy sciences. 2. Human behavior. I. Somit, Albert. II. Peterson, Steven A. H97.H86 2003 320⬘.6—dc21

2002192490

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June, 2003 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

List of Contributors

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Part 1 The Evolutionary Approach and the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) Understanding of Human Nature and Human Behavior: Policy Relevance Chapter 1

From Human Nature to Public Policy: Evolutionary Theory Challenges the “Standard Model” Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson Chapter 2 From Theory to Practice: Caveat Emptor Lionel Tiger Part 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9

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Implications for Domestic Policy

Prostitution—An Evolutionary Perspective Michael McGuire and Margaret Gruter Relating to the Environment: Legacy and Learning Lynton Keith Caldwell Neuroscience, Free Will, and Individual Responsibility: Implications for Addictive Behavior Robert H. Blank The Cultural Evolution of Dying: Euthanasia in the Netherlands Vincent S. E. Falger and Eugene L. F. Falger Biosocial Theorizing and Criminal Justice Policy Lee Ellis Evolution and Political Marketing Gad Saad Explore and Exploit: An Evolutionary Analysis of Institutional Dynamics Arthur T. Denzau and Paul J. Zak

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77 97 121

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Contents

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

MacLean’s Evolutionary Neuroscience and the Conflict Systems Neurobehavioral Model: Some Clinical and Social Policy Implications Gerald A. Cory, Jr. Altruism and Good Samaritan Law John Strate Part 3

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Implications for International Policy

Chapter 12 An Ecological Approach to Agricultural Biotechnology Policy Hiram Caton Chapter 13 Ethnic Conflict and State Building Bradley A. Thayer Chapter 14 Genetic and Cultural Evolution: Implications for International Security Policies J. David Singer Index

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Robert Blank. Chair of Public Policy at Brunel University in London. Previously, he was Chair of Political Science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He has published widely in biomedical policy. Recent books include: The Price of Life, Brain Policy, Biology and Political Science. Current research focuses on neurogenetics and public policy. Lynton K. Caldwell. Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Indiana University. He is one of the intellectual parents of the “environmental impact statement,” at the heart of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). He has written extensively on environmental issues and is internationally known for his work. Hiram Caton. Dr. Caton was Professor of Politics and History at Griffith University (Australia) prior to his retirement. He is currently a Fellow of the Key Center for Ethics, Law, Justice, and Governance at Griffith University. Principal publications listed at amazon.com. Gerald A. Cory, Jr. Director, Center for Behavioral Ecology; teaches in retirement at San Jose State University. Received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. Has been selected to serve as President of the Across-Species Comparisons and Psychopathology Society. Author of such books as The Reciprocal Modular Brain in Economics and Politics, Toward Consilience, and (coedited with Russell Gardner) The Evolutionary Neuroethology of Paul MacLean. Arthur T. Denzau. His research has focused on public sector resource allocation. While teaching History of Economic Thought, he became interested in Evolutionary Epistemology, thus leading him to explore biological ideas in the field of economics. Lee Ellis. Professor of Sociology at Minot State University. His main areas of research interests have to do with criminality, social stratification, and sexual

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orientation. He has numerous publications on the linkage between biology and criminality. He is currently coediting a volume, Biosocial Criminology: Challenging Environmentalism’s Supremacy. Eugene L. F. Falger. An ophthalmologist at St. Jansdal Hospital, Harderwijk, the Netherlands. He has lectured on health care policy and end-of-life issues. Vincent S. E. Falger. Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Utrecht. Research interests cover evolutionary approaches to human nature, international politics, in-group-out-group phenomena, and the abuse of biological theories for political purposes. He is active in the European Sociobiological Society and the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences. Margaret Gruter. Doctor of Jurisprudence from the University of Heidelberg and J. S. M. from Stanford University Law School. President and Executive Director, Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research. Has taught at Stanford University and Heidelberg University. Her research interest focuses on the interaction between law and biologically based human behavior. Michael McGuire. President of the Biomedical Research Foundation and Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. His research interests include nonhuman primate behavior, nonhuman primate brain physiology, human ethology, and evolutionary interpretations of human behavior. Steven A. Peterson. Professor of Politics and Public Affairs and Director of the School of Public Affairs at Penn State Harrisburg. Active in Research Committee # 12 (Biology and Politics) of the International Political Science Association as well as the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences. Has published extensively in biopolitics. Gad Saad. He obtained his Ph.D. from Cornell University and his MBA from McGill University. He is currently serving as Visiting Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of California at Irvine. He has a permanent position at Concordia University (Montreal). His relevant research interest is the nexus between marketing and evolutionary psychology. J. David Singer. Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is author of many articles and books on international politics. He is internationally known for his work on war and other topics. Albert Somit. Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at Southern Illinois University. Served as Executive Vice President at the State University of


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New York at Buffalo and President of Southern Illinois University. A pioneer in biopolitics and the founder of Research Committee # 12 of the International Political Science Association. Has published extensively in biopolitics, including his book (coauthored with Steven Peterson), Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy. John Strate. Associate Professor of Political Science at Wayne State University and Director of the Master of Public Administration program. Current research interests include the politics of physician-assisted suicides, legislative term limits, and Good Samaritan Law. Bradley Thayer. Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota at Duluth. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His most recent research applies evolutionary theory to international relations theory and international security issues. Lionel Tiger. Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Well known author of books, including: Men in Groups, The Imperial Animal, Optimism: The Biology of Hope, The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System, The Pursuit of Pleasure, The Decline of Males. Paul Zak. Associate Professor in the School of Politics and Economics at Claremont Graduate University. Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Research focus has been on co-evolution of populations, institutions, and economic performance.


PART 1

The Evolutionary Approach and the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) Understanding of Human Nature and Human Behavior: Policy Relevance


CHAPTER 1

From Human Nature to Public Policy: Evolutionary Theory Challenges the “Standard Model” Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson

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or some twenty-five centuries, the “nature of human nature” has been the central issue in Western political thought. Fully aware of that issue’s crucial importance, many of our greatest political philosophers (Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Machiavelli immediately come to mind) made it their explicit point of departure. Although not always as readily recognized, much the same has been true in the formulation of public policy. With few exceptions, the policies adopted in a given polity reflect and flow from the views about human nature held by those charged with setting these policies. The reason is quite simple. Almost invariably, the measures proposed to deal with social, political, and economic problems stem from some (often unarticulated) conception of human nature and a corresponding set of assumptions about the likely consequences of governmental efforts to encourage, redirect, limit, or even prohibit a given type of social, political, or economic behavior. For at least the past fifty years, the so-called Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) has dominated the behavioral sciences, colored popular thought, and, by its pervasiveness, directly and indirectly influenced public policy (e.g., see Harrison and Huntington, 2000). As we know, the SSSM insists that, for all practical purposes, human nature—and thus human behavior—is shaped1 by culture. Put less laconically, the SSSM rests on three

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cardinal tenets—two of them explicit, the third usually implicit. These are: (1) that humans have no innate behavioral tendencies; (2) that, consequently, human nature is solely the product of learning and socialization (in short, of “nurture”); from which it follows (3) that human nature (and consequently human behavior) is essentially quite malleable. Long the reigning paradigm—and accepted even by most Marxist theorists— the hitherto hegemonic SSSM has recently been challenged by an increasingly formidable rival. In literally every one of the social and behavioral sciences, there are now practitioners who advocate an evolutionary model (EM) that flatly contradicts the tenets on which the SSSM is based. Yes, the EM agrees, culture is important, but so are the genetically transmitted behavioral tendencies that our species has evolved over literally millions of years (“nature,” of course). Given this reality, both nature and nurture must be taken into account if we are to understand why humans act as they do. Almost inevitably, the idea that our evolutionary past may sometimes significantly influence how we act today leads to a radically different conception of the wellsprings of human behavior and of human nature itself. Almost inevitably, too, it often leads to quite different conclusions about the issues that governments should address and of the policies best suited to deal with these issues. The near-180 degree shift in orientation raises three closely related questions. First, how does the EM paradigm differ from that of the SSSM in its approach to human behavior? Second, how does it differ in its understanding of human nature? Third, and obviously the central concern of this book, what are the implications of these differences for the formulation of public policy? The magnitude and scope of the third question clearly compels a division of labor. Accordingly, we left the analyses of these implications, as they apply to a wide-ranging spectrum of domestic and foreign policy issues, to fellow contributors who are recognized authorities in their respective fields. As the reader will soon realize, in some instances, the policies suggested by the EM may be disconcertingly counterintuitive; in almost all areas, they tend to part company with those, so often enacted, that flow from the SSSM. Key Differences in Approach to Human Behavior The two models differ in many striking respects in their approaches to human behavior. Some of these are major conceptual differences; others, although the borderline is not always easily drawn, may reasonably be viewed as a matter of relative emphasis, rather than of fundamental disagreement.

The Evolutionary Theory

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Among the former are (1) the role of culture in shaping behavior; (2) genetic factors as behavioral influences; (3) the use of historical evidence; and (4) the relevance of primatological data. Not surprisingly, these conflicting views eventuate in a basic parting of the ways with regard to the malleability of human nature—and of human behavior. With regard to differences of emphasis, we would surely have to list the following: (1) research methodology; (2) solutions vs. trade-offs; and (3) the importance of chance and accident in human affairs and the resulting difficulty of correctly divining actual policy outcomes. We will examine these in the order listed.

Major Conceptual Differences The Role of Culture in Shaping Behavior The importance of culture as a factor in shaping human behavior is probably the most commonly misunderstood—and sometimes deliberately misrepresented— aspect of the evolutionary model. For this reason, the issue should be addressed head-on. As noted earlier, the SSSM holds that, for all practical purposes, human behavior is the product of culture; the EM differs significantly in that it looks as well at the extent to which behavior might also be influenced by our evolutionary legacy as social primates.2 But far from denigrating culture, the EM stresses that ours is the only species that has evolved the capacity for developing anything more than a very rudimentary culture.3 Even more to the point, it emphasizes that Homo sapiens are the only species capable of creating and, in many circumstances, then acting in accordance with beliefs that actually run counter to some very powerful innate behavioral tendencies.4 The charge is regularly made that the EM, dismissing culture out of hand, would “reduce” all behavior to biology. Almost always, this charge is based on what E. O. Wilson is alleged to have said (or implied) in the concluding chapter of his (once infamous, now classic) Sociobiology.5 That, however, was a quarter-century ago and even then Wilson’s views (considerably modified since) were hardly representative of his fellow biologists. Today, and for probably the past two decades, even a casual reading of the human ethology literature leaves little doubt of the importance the EM attaches to culture as a behavioral influence.6 The point need not be belabored. One model holds that to understand human social behavior we should look only at culture;7 the other contends that we should—in fact, must—also consider the possibility that evolution has endowed us, as it has all other species, with innate propensities, which often

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influence that behavior. If we dispassionately weigh these two formulations, we can quite reasonably ask—which is truly “reductionist”? Genetic Factors as Behavioral Influences In light of what has already been said, the discussion here can be quite brief. Beyond doubt, culture plays a very important role in shaping how we act, but so do genetically transmitted behavioral tendencies evolved over literally millions of years.8 Some of these are probably unique to our species—language, culture (in any “rich” sense),9 and, surely unique, often a willingness to sacrifice ourselves in behalf of some religious or secular belief. However, there are other proclivities, perhaps not always so admirable, that we share with most of our fellow primates. Among these are hierarchical social structures characterized by dominance above and submission below; status seeking;10 aggression; selfishness;11 an aversion to celibacy and an often reluctant and unreliable commitment to monogamy (Barash and Lipton, 2001); xenophobia; ethnocentrism; and nepotistic favoritism.12 These behaviors have become part of our genetic legacy because they have served on balance to maximize the “inclusive fitness” of our ancestral fellow speciates, and the fellow speciates from which they, in even earlier times, evolved. As history abundantly testifies, culture (especially when it actively encourages religious, ideological, or ethnic animosities), may stimulate and strengthen these tendencies. Perhaps more frequently, though, it works to constrain, modify, or even prohibit their expression, albeit with less than invariable success. For much of humankind, there is often a regrettable gap between the morality their culture preaches and what individuals actually practice. In any event, whether culturally ignored, encouraged, deplored, or even banned, these biologically based proclivities play a significant role in shaping how we behave, individually and collectively. Use of Historical Evidence Historical evidence can be used for two essentially, but not completely, different purposes. One is the attempt to discern—in human history—broad repetitive patterns, direction(s), teleological design, laws, or even some ultimate goal. Among the most familiar examples of this usage would be (1) the early Greek conception of decline, that is, from an age of gold to that of brass; (2) the later Platonic and Aristotelian notion of a cyclical pattern of political change; (3) the belief that history inexorably moves toward a predetermined end, a conviction found in Judaic, Christian, and Moslem religions and (in secular form) in Hegel and Marx. And, to be sure, there is the idea of history


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as inevitable “progress,” originally voiced in the West by Condorcet and later, recast in a more “scientific” guise, by Herbert Spencer. The second, less sweeping usage is to support a given political theory or, still more narrowly employed, to justify (or oppose) a proposed public policy or set of policies. Here (speaking only of the secular realm) we find quite a range of views on the usage and relevance of historical evidence. On some of these, supporters of the SSSM and the EM tend to concur; on others, they differ. Historical Evidence as the Basis for Ethical or Moral Norms Here, of course, we have the so-called naturalistic fallacy—the claim that persistent historical regularities (what has been) can properly be the basis for moral or ethical rules (i.e., what should be). In earlier eras, the defense of monarchy often rested on this contention; some nineteenth-century Social Darwinists,13 purporting to find “survival of the fittest” the ineluctable rule in nature and in history, elevated it to the philosophical principle by which sound public policy should be determined; and, to offer only one more example, there were those who, pointing to the frequency and ubiquity of armed conflict across the ages, concluded that it must therefore serve a positive and constructive purpose. By and large, this use of history, at least in its more blatant form, is rarely encountered today in either the SSSM or the EM camps (see Barash, 2001). Granted, an occasional article or even book may argue that, properly understood, history can yield valid ethical and moral principles but a persuasive demonstration of that possibility is yet to be seen. History as the Basis for Predicting Future Behavior On this question, the two models part company rather quickly. As might be expected, evolutionary theory holds that, barring mutation or some profound environmental change, the behaviors a species has evolved are likely to remain essentially constant. In terms of public policy, this means that where attempts to alter or even prohibit behavior have been consistently unsuccessful in the past, similar attempts are not likely to be any more effective in the future.14 From this perspective, the leopard does not readily change its spots. Or, as Edmund Burke put it in a pre-Darwinian era, “We cannot change the nature of things and of man, but must act upon them as best we can.” Nor surprisingly, given the emphasis it places on culture and the determinative role of socialization, the SSSM is far readier to discount the significance of past behavioral consistencies. If human nature is essentially malleable, history is not necessarily a reliable guide to the future—and efforts to modify human behavior that have failed in the past may well be more successful in the future. That is, the leopard might be induced (or compelled) to

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change its spots. Implicit in the SSSM, as one of its severest critics has not unfairly observed, is the optimistic conviction that “. . . a new, better, and perhaps perfect nature can be produced by a rearrangement of social institutions” (Bork, 1996: 27). Use of Primatological Data The divergence between the two models on this point is eminently reasonable. If, on the one hand, human behavior is shaped almost entirely by culture and socialization, information about other species, no matter how closely related biologically, serves no useful purpose since it does little or nothing to further our understanding of human behavior. On the other hand, if our genetic legacy meaningfully influences how we act, then the study of closely related species (and especially the apes) that share much of that legacy. . . . Well, the rest of the reasoning need hardly be elaborated (for an apt statement of the relevance of this type of research, see Stanford, 2001). Given their underlying premises, for both models the conclusions are logically equally sound; both can justifiably say “QED.” Whether they are equally valid scientifically is, of course, quite another matter. Differences of Degree and of Emphasis There are sharp disagreements between the two models on the issues just discussed. The gap is smaller on the points to which we now turn—and even some occasional overlap of position between their respective proponents. But the differences, though not as great, are no less real. Research Methodology The study of human behavior from an evolutionary perspective emerged from, and by many is still regarded as a subfield of, the much broader discipline—animal ethology. And ethological research, it is essential to stress, is guided by a key dictum: to understand how and why an organism acts as it does, we must observe its natural behavior in a natural setting.15 Applied to the study of our own species, this means we should focus our attention on actual behavior, rather than some surrogate for behavior. As a consequence, although there are numerous similarities in research methodology between the SSSM and the EM, there are also some notable differences. Among the most important of these are as follows: Survey Research One of the most frequently employed weapons in the SSSM armory, survey research seeks to elicit information about attitudes, beliefs, preferences, and/or past, present, or prospective behaviors by means


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of oral, written, or physical (press a lever, etc.) responses. These responses, after appropriate (and often arcane) statistical analyses, are then treated as valid and accurate measures of, and surrogates for, the attitudes, behaviors, and the like under investigation. This is hardly the place to enter into a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of survey research, an issue on which there is an already abundant literature. We need only say that the EM, with its ethologically derived emphasis on actual behavior in a real-life setting, regards survey responses as dubious equivalents of behavior, and views surveys, by and large, as the research instrument of last resort. Experiment Both models accept experiment as a valid means of inquiry. But the EM introduces a stringent requirement—the setting, conditions, and “tests” of the experiment should mirror, to the greatest degree possible, the environment and challenges that the subject(s) would encounter under reallife conditions. For this reason, the EM eschews experiments in which the subjects (worms, mice, birds, primates, etc.) are tested in environments— and required to perform tasks—that have little or no relationship to their normal mode of existence. For the same reason it looks askance at experiments where human subjects are placed in a patently artificial setting and are asked to perform tasks and/or give responses that lack meaningful consequences. The behaviors observed under these conditions, ethologists have long maintained, may have little relationship to how the organisms would respond under real-life conditions. This “bias” was nicely summarized by Michael Ruse in his comment that “. . . laboratory experiments have the definite value of showing what can occur, not what does occur and certainly not what must occur . . . it remains to be seen that mechanisms which can operate in the laboratory do in fact operate in nature” (1998: 57). Admittedly, this places serious constraints upon experiments involving human subjects (and conceivably other “higher primates”) who are intelligent enough to realize the artificiality of the situation and of what they are being asked to do. Beyond doubt, it requires considerable ingenuity, effort, and (often) resources to devise experiments that can meet these requirements. But when satisfactorily accomplished, as Robert Milgram’s famously infamous research on human obedience (1974) testifies, the results can be truly impressive. Gaming and Mathematical Modeling In principle, these would be quite acceptable if—and it is a huge if—the game and/or the model reasonably

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satisfies the requirements mentioned earlier. Regrettably, no one has yet been able to design and carry out an experimental game in which the participants’ behavior entailed more than trivial personal consequences; as yet, mathematical models suffer not only from that limitation but from the arbitrary and often grossly over-simplifying stipulations.16 In recent decades, the so-called rational choice approach has won a sizable following in many of the social and behavioral sciences; in some, in fact, it is now the dominant school of thought.17 Despite its formalistic guise, rational choice is essentially a variant of the SSSM,18 and its practitioners rely heavily on gaming and mathematical modeling. Although some of those committed to an evolutionary perspective have begun to explore these techniques, the net effect (at least in the short run) has been to widen rather than narrow the gap between the two schools. Trade-Offs rather than Solutions Evolutionary change, its eponymous model teaches, almost invariably entails a trade-off. Even when the change serves, on balance, to better fit the organism to its environment, there is a price tag involved. Thus, greater size requires greater caloric intake for its maintenance; more speed comes at the cost of endurance; greater acuity in one sense usually entails diminished sensitivity in another; and a more massive protective covering or carapace leads to lessened mobility. Coming closer to home there are some familiar (and often painful) examples. The shift of our primate ancestors to an upright posture opened a Pandora’s box of back ailments; a larger skull to accommodate Homo sapiens’ enlarged brain turned childbirth into a painful and sometimes fatal experience; and a vastly expanded capacity to learn and a lessened need to rely on genetically transmitted behavioral patterns was achieved by a prolonged period of child nurture and care. In evolution as elsewhere, there is no free lunch.19 So schooled, the EM approach to policy problems is less in terms of a “solution” and more in terms of what is to be gained—and lost. What is the projected policy likely to achieve and—too often overlooked or ignored— what might be the possible negative consequences?20 Is there a real danger the latter will outweigh the former?21 These are questions that, with the wisdom of hindsight, were obviously not adequately considered in enacting the ill-fated “Prohibition” amendment, in structuring the 1960s “War on Poverty” or, to take an ongoing instance, the decades old “War on Drugs.”22 We do not want to suggest that the difference here between the two approaches is black or white, all or none, or invariably qualitative rather than quantitative. Within each camp there are gradations of belief and, no doubt,


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considerable overlap of opinion. Nonetheless, we think that, faced with a policy problem, those who share an evolutionary perspective are more likely to be wary of ready “solutions” and to seek, instead, a course that seems to offer, on balance, the greatest promise of a positive pay-off. The Difficulty of Predicting the Future: The Role of Chance and Accident in Human Affairs Here, curiously enough, the two models seemingly reverse their positions. EM advocates, though confident of the continuity of human behavior, are skeptical about our ability to foresee the course of events much beyond the immediate present. SSSM partisans, though denying that past human behaviors must necessarily repeat themselves, tend to be more confident of their ability to anticipate—and possibly even to control—future developments. The apparent paradox can be readily explained. Evolutionary theory, as its opponents rightfully charge, denies that natural selection is guided or directed by any ultimate teleology, purpose, or objective. Thus, the appearance, evolution, and (in most instances) the eventual disappearance of a species is seen as a process governed by chance, accident, and contingency. To take the most obvious cases in point, there was surely no way of predicting the several mass extinctions that have occurred since life first originated on earth. Sheer happenstance made it possible, some sixty-five million years ago, for a tiny shrew-like creature to survive one of these biological disasters and, by the luck of the evolutionary draw, to become our mammalian forebears. Understandably, those trained in evolutionary theory are likely to see random events (technically termed “nonlinearities”) as playing a greater role in history, and the future correspondingly less predictable and subject to human control, than do the SSSM partisans.23 To Sum Up . . . The fundamental disagreement between the two models, it seems clear, is on the factors that shape, if they do not actually determine, human nature. Given their divergent positions on this issue, their other differences are almost inevitable. For the SSSM, human nature and thus human behavior is essentially the product of culture, and it is to culture alone (i.e., nurture) that the behavioral sciences should attend. For the EM, both culture and genetically transmitted behavioral tendencies (i.e., nature) are operative and consequently both need fall within our purview. They differ, accordingly and we can say necessarily, on human nature. With its emphasis on culture, the SSSM comes perilously close to the

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Lockean tabula rasa with humans as blank slates upon which culture and experience inscribe their dictates. Not so for the EM. Evolution has endowed our species, as it has all other forms of life, with behavioral proclivities (ranging from aggressiveness to xenophobia); culture may strengthen these proclivities; on occasion it may override them; but in either event they significantly influence our actions. Closely related to this, of course, is the question of human malleability. Those who believe in the SSSM are much more (we are tempted to say congenitally) optimistic about the possibility of altering human behavior than are advocates of the EM24 who, as did Edmund Burke, give greater weight to the inherent limitations of human nature and of the human mind. Turning to the use of historical evidence (the “argument from history”), both agree that what has been does not provide a valid basis for determining what should be. The EM, however, looks carefully at long-established behavioral patterns and, consistent with its notion of limited human malleability, sees those patterns are likely to persist in the future. No less consistent, the SSSM is more inclined to what we might call an “it ain’t necessarily so” stance. On the other hand, given the emphasis in evolutionary theory on the role of accident and nonlinearities,25 the EM is the more cautious of the two with regard to our capacity to predict, let alone direct, the course of future events. Not surprisingly, the two models do not always see eye-to-eye with regard to research methodology. Both endorse experiment but, as noted above, the EM stresses that the experiment should entail, as nearly as possible, a real-life environment and meaningful (for the subject) challenges and tasks. The importance of real-life conditions leads most EM proponents to view survey research, gaming, and mathematical modeling with limited enthusiasm. In analogous fashion, the SSSM denies that the evidence from primatology, to which the EM gives considerable weight, is really relevant to the study of human behavior. As might be expected, these conflicting conceptions of human nature, human behavior, and even of history, yield markedly dissimilar approaches to social, economic, and political problems. The SSSM, more sanguine about the prospects of appreciably modifying human behavior and our capacity to direct and control the course of events, is more inclined to think in terms of solutions; the EM, in contrast, tends to see problems more in terms of constrained options, difficult trade-offs, and uncertain outcomes. It would be truly remarkable if the policies advocated by the devotees of one of these models were not frequently at odds with those favored by partisans of the other.


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And, as the chapters to follow repeatedly evidence, they frequently are. This book, then, argues that an EM yields a much more realistic understanding of human behavior than does the SSSM—although the latter has long dominated our approach to political, social, and economic problems. Among the policy implications of the EM, to select only some of the topics discussed in the book, are the following. (1) The only realistic way to deal with prostitution is via legalization and careful regulation. (2) The absolute necessity of employing agricultural biotechnology (i.e., genetic modification) if world food-needs are to be met. (3) The social desirability of legally permitted and carefully regulated physician-assisted suicide. (4) The danger of relying on “technical fixes” to solve increasingly urgent environmental problems. Their solution requires, rather, a change to carefully regulated sustainable development. (5) Drug policies based on the assumption of individual free will and responsibility are designed for failure, as the evidence testifies. (6) There should be much greater utilization of psychopharmaceutical methods, rather than sole dependence on imprisonment, in treating criminal and antisocial behavior. (7) There should be a formal reward system for encouraging “Good Samaritan” behavior (rescue efforts, altruistic interventions, etc.). (8) Foreign policy intended to deal with ethnic conflicts in other countries should be based on minimum expectations since these deep-seated ethnic conflicts tend to be almost intractable. A corollary of this position is that we should invest minimum resources in attempts at “nation-building” in those countries. (9) Efforts designed to eliminate and/or reduce war, violence, and “terror” in relations between peoples and nations should be based on the realization that these behaviors have characterized human affairs since the beginning of recorded history and have given no indication of diminution, all palliative efforts notwithstanding. (10) In the selection of political candidates, the ideal male prospect would be tall, physically attractive, moderately but not too overtly Machiavellian, and, contrary to established folklore, not necessarily free of imputation of extramarital sexual dalliances.26 On the other hand, the ideal female candidates, whatever their other favorable attributes, must be free of any such imputation. Appendix: Basic Introduction to Evolutionary Theory Evolution is a theory of change among living forms. Whether we are looking at the familiar evolution of horses or of dogs or of humans, we see change in how the individuals within a species appear over time. Darwin’s theory of evolution was based on two simple propositions: first, there is variation among creatures within any species; second, some of the variation is more apt to provide survival advantage for

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individuals and, hence, will be selected. As Mayr puts it (1992: 22): “Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.” Populations tend to produce more offspring than an environment can support. Natural selection is the process by which nature selects those individuals whose characteristics are best fit for survival in their environments. Individuals whose characteristics do not fit an environment so well will tend to die off before reproducing or reproduce less successfully (for a good, brief introduction to evolutionary theory, see Mayr, 2001). Those characteristics that fit the environment and confer some survival value for the organism are termed “adaptations.” Those organisms most adapted to their environments are more likely to survive to reproduce. In that sense, they are more “fit” (e.g., see Williams, 1966). Their offspring, in turn, carry these adaptations and are themselves more likely to survive and reproduce. Over time, individuals within a successful species develop adaptations that make them increasingly more apt to manifest reproductive success and have those adaptations become dominant or widespread within the species. Assume that we have a particular environment. Each year, two hundred young of a species are born with just enough food and other resources to support only one hundred of the young. Thus, many will die. Those whose physical characteristics and behavior allow them to flourish better in their environment will be the ones we would expect to survive. And, in turn, they would be expected to mature and reproduce and have their genes represented in the forthcoming generation. Evolution is not just about survival—but transmission of the characteristics that enabled that survival. In Darwin’s time and for decades thereafter, though, the mechanism by which adaptations were transmitted from generation to generation was unknown. Those theories in existence at the time were unable to adequately account for transmission. It was the work of Gregor Mendel, who described the transmission of characteristics from generation to generation, that paved the way for an understanding of genetics. We now know that genes are the basic units by which characteristics are passed on from one generation to the next. In the 1930s, biologists like R. A. Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall Wright began to link genetics with Darwinian natural selection. This wedding of genetics and Darwinian theory was the foundation of the modern synthetic theory of evolution. Two of the classic works outlining the synthetic theory are by Ernst Mayr (1963) and Theodosius Dobzhansky (1951). More recently, Stephen Jay Gould has contributed his final work as a massive discourse on evolution: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002). One major current approach to applying evolutionary theory to human social behavior appears in later chapters of this volume. Sociobiology is the study of the evolutionary bases of social behavior (Wilson, 1975; Dawkins, 1989). A key concept for sociobiology is “inclusive fitness.” For sociobiology, an underlying premise is that evolution has inclined living organisms to those modes of behavior most likely to


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maximize the number of his/her genes transmitted to the next generation. This can be done in two different ways: first, by passing along one’s genes directly, usually referred to as individual reproductive success; second, one can behave in such a manner as to increase reproductive success of one’s relatives, with whom one shares genes. The combination of these two is termed “inclusive fitness,” encompassing both the reproductive success of an individual and of that individual’s relatives with whom, depending upon the degree of relatedness, the individual shares more or fewer genes (see Barash, 1982; Dawkins, 1989, Wilson, 1975). Let us illustrate the application of this perspective to social behavior, specifically with reference to dominance behavior (a striving to attain valued goods, whether food, power, or shelter) and the formation of social and political hierarchies (see Somit and Peterson, 1997). Social primates display dominance behavior; they also live, in the main, in hierarchical social (and in the case of our species, political) structures. Hierarchy is, in fact, one of the most pervasive and ubiquitous characteristics of human social (as well as political) organization. Dominance behavior can, according to evolutionary theory, affect reproductive opportunities. Dominance relations yield predictability. Individuals know where they stand with one another with respect to access to valued resources, as noted earlier. As a consequence, there is no need to constantly dispute who is to get what, disputes which, at best, would entail repeated and possibly substantial investments of energy and, at worst, repeated risks of injury or death. Dominance furthers predictability and predictability, in turn, benefits both the dominant and the subordinate. The former gains the desired resource (and resulting possible enhancement of inclusive fitness) at no greater cost than a possible threat or two; the subordinate, by yielding, escapes a clash that might otherwise reduce or literally end his/her reproductive possibilities. No less significantly, a society beset with continuing turmoil is not conducive to reproductive success. The more orderly mode of life generated by the type of predictability just described creates more felicitous conditions for passing one’s genes along to the next generation. A stable, peaceful society is more apt to lead to individual reproductive success than one in continuing disarray and upheaval as a result of constant fighting over status and resources.

Notes 1. Some advocates might even say “determined.” 2. For a brief summary of evolutionary thought and some key concepts, please read the appendix to this chapter. 3. Whether other species, especially among the social primates and our fellow apes, have evolved even a pale shadow of that capacity remains a matter of some dispute among primatologists. E.g., see Boyd and Silk, 1997. 4. The willingness to suffer and even to die on behalf of some religious or secular conviction (nationalism is the classic example of the latter) is an obvious

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5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

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and familiar example; voluntary celibacy (and possibly faithful monogamy) is another. In retrospect, as Michael Ruse has written, Wilson’s book marked “. . . the end of a recessive Darwinism, a Darwinism polite enough to coexist peacefully with traditional social science.” But there was a stiff price to be paid—“No Darwinian had been treated to such sustained moral and political denunciation [and even physical assault] since Charles Darwin himself ” (1998: 168–169). See, e.g., the space devoted to “memes” (the cultural analogue of genes) by Richard Dawkins (1989), generally regarded as making the most sweeping claims for the EM. A recent article in a major political science journal, specifically surveying the “causes of war,” failed to even mention the idea that the human tendency toward aggressive behavior might be a possible contributing factor. Since that statement holds for all other species, it would be truly miraculous if it were not true of ours. “Human beings produce culture in the same sense that they produce carbon dioxide: they can’t help it” (Menand, 2001: 407). “There can never be enough status to go around . . . a top dog exists only by virtue of his inferior” (Jones, 1999: 81). John Adams said much the same, some two hundred years earlier—“I believe there is no one principle which predominates in human nature so much in every state of life, from the cradle to the grave . . . as this passion for superiority” (McCullough, 2001: 170). As Michael Ruse puts it, human nature exhibits “. . . self-interest, if not outright selfishness, with the host of features and attitudes and characteristics that we find offensive and that the Christian judges sinful” (cited by Crews, 2001: 54). And, according to Melvin Konner, “It would be disingenuous to omit hatred, lust and greed, which come to mind when human nature is mentioned” (Konners, 2002: 121). Or, as William Hamilton, a leading neo-Darwinian theorist, put it, “. . . genetics, not nurture, accounts for a large and important range of human behavior—from racism and xenophobia to differences in intellectual abilities between men and women—and that only by admitting this, only by casting aside hypocrisy on the matter, can fundamental human problems be tackled” (quoted in Judson, 2002: 17–18). Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner are probably the best known examples. To be sure, one need not be a Darwinian to arrive at this conclusion. Michels’ “Iron Law of Oligarchy” and Orwell’s Animal Farm are classic examples of the conviction that, if history teaches anything, it is that past behavioral patterns can confidently be counted on to recur—and recur. A technique urged on political scientists—though not personally practiced—by Woodrow Wilson, more than a century ago (Wilson, 1887: 188–189). This does not preclude the possibility that gaming and mathematical modeling may have some heuristic value.


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17. This now seems to be the case in political science. See, e.g., Goodin and Klingemann (1996). More recently, Benjamin Barber deplored “. . . the ‘rational choice’ approach that is so disturbingly dominant in our nation’s graduate schools” (2001: 27). 18. We say this for two reasons: first, and probably more important, because of its emphasis on the “rationality” of human behavior; second, although there is now emerging a curious ambivalence, because it, too, still treats nurture as the determinative factor in behavior. That ambivalence, we predict, will necessarily be resolved by a much more “neo-Darwinian” stance. 19. “Apropos of lunch, chickens bred for meat lay fewer eggs; those who lay more eggs tend to die sooner . . . .” (Jones, 1999: 74). 20. “When culture is conceived of as an evolutionary product—an ecology of human relations—it is by no means clear than any and all well-articulated reasons for changing particular parts of the social ecology must be valid. Even if plausible in the specific case, a policy’s unintended consequences throughout a complex system is a weighty consideration” (Sowell, 1980: 103). 21. Hegel somewhere remarked that politics offers only bad choices, i.e., the choice between greater and lesser evils. 22. As gently hinted earlier, the SSSM tends to dismiss the “argument from history” in matters relating to the consistency of human behavior. One is reminded of Poobah’s statement to the Mikado that “When your highness orders that something be done, it’s as good as done. And if it’s as good as done, then it’s done.” 23. “The all-too-human response to the prospect of nonlinearities is denial” (Terborgh, 2001: 44). 24. Thomas Sowell speaks rather uncharitably of the “anointed”—those who have great faith in their capacity to modify human behavior by adjusting the “underlying social conditions” so as to make people desire the right, rather than the wrong, thing (Brude-Briggs, 1977: 125). 25. Stephen J. Gould invariably emphasizes what he calls the “. . . enormously complex, uniquely contingent, and utterly unrepeatable history of life” (2001: 51). 26. E.g., someone has said: “The Kennedy magic seems to work best when ambition comes wrapped with a bit of roguery” (Lexington, 2002).

References Barash, David. (1982). Sociobiology and Behavior. New York: Elsevier, 2nd edition. Barash, David. (2001). The tyranny of the natural. Chronicle of Higher Education November 2: 816–817. Barash, David and Judith Lipton. (2001). The Myth of Monogamy. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. Barber, Benjamin. (2001). The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House. New York: Norton. Bork, Robert. (1996). Slouching Toward Gomorrah.

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Boyd, Robert and Joan B. Silk. (1997). How Humans Evolved. New York: Norton. Brude-Briggs, B. (1977). The War Against the Automobile. New York: Dutton. Crews, Frederick (2001). Saving us from Darwin. New York Review October 18: 54. Dawkins, Richard. (1989). The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, revised edition. Dobzhansky, Theodosius. (1951). Genetics and the Origin of Species. New York: Columbia University Press. Goodin, Robert E. and Hans-Dieter Klingemann (Eds.). (1996). A New Handbook of Political Science. New York: Oxford University Press. Gould, Stephen J. (2001). The man who set the clock back. The New York Review October 4: 51–52. Gould, Stephen Jay. (2002). The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harrison, Lawrence E. and Samuel H. Huntington. (2000). Culture Matters. New York: Basic Books. Jones, Steve. (1999). Darwin’s Ghosts: The Origin of Species. New York: Ballantine. Judson, Olivia P. (2002). The book of Revelation. Nature March 7: 17–18. Konner, Marvin. (2002). Seeking universals. Nature January 10: 121. Lexington. (2002). The failing lure of Camelot. The Economist August 31– September 8: 25. Mayr, Ernst. (1963). Animal Species and Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mayr, Ernst. (1992). Speciational evolution or punctuated equilibria. In Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson (Eds.), The Dynamics of Evolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mayr, Ernst. (2001). What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books. McCullough, David. (2001). John Adams. New York: Simon and Schuster. Menand, Louis. (2001). The Metaphysical Club. New York: Straus and Giroux. Milgram, Stanley. (1974). Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper and Row. Ruse, Michael. (1998). Darwin’s Spectre. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Somit, Albert and Steven A. Peterson. (1997). Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy. Westport, CT: Praeger. Sowell, Thomas. (1980). Knowledge and Decisions. New York: Basic Books. Stanford, Craig. (2001). Significant Others: The Ape–Human Continuum and the Quest for Human Nature. New York: Basic Books. Terborgh, John. (2001). The age of giants. New York Review of Books September 20: 44–45. Williams, George. (1966). Adaptation and Natural Selection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wilson, Edward O. (1975). Sociobiology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wilson, Woodrow. (1887) “The Study of Politics,” New Princeton Review 3: 170–193.

CHAPTER 2

From Theory to Practice: Caveat Emptor Lionel Tiger

Introduction

A

theme of this volume is critical discussion of the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM). This is a desirable and even necessary form of exploration. It reflects the manner in which existing theories of the nature of behavior can be affected by new scientific information and ways of thinking. It is part of an effort, finally, to import the impact of Darwin into the social sciences. These have felt insulated from it by a mixture of poor scientific education, the Durkheimian avoidance of parsimony, and gardenvariety confusions about the links between “is” and “ought.” But let’s not lose perspective. Even though academic people are familiar and comfortable within the well-trod zone of internecine struggle in the social sciences, there is also a “world out there.” It is composed of operating human beings. They have a Standard Social Model of how the world works. It obviously affects what they do and why they think they do it. It is an amalgam of the experiences they have had and the general ideas they use in order to understand these experiences and predict the course of future ones. Perhaps this model is not self-consciously scientific. People managing their lives do not customarily proclaim what is the central theoretical system within which they make decisions.1 It is not unknown that members of this majority group in the population overtly express disdain for devotees of theory. The folk-reputation of academics as impractical outliers of real life reflects strong views about the tenants of the Ivory Tower. Those of us who inhabit the

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management floors of that tower should endure some humility about the relatively poor repute, and puzzlement, with which many of our intellectual management decisions are received by operators of what we call here the Standard Model of Today’s Experience—SMOTE. Users of SMOTE would include politicians, people who manage businesses, who are buyers for shirt shops, chiropractors, who give out licenses for taxi drivers, and chefs for food chains who generate decisions about the optimum thickness of French fried potatoes. They are usually very busy or feel they are, with a chronic sense of more to do than time in which to do it. They get on with their lives. My concern in this comment is to approach the question: how can critics of the SSSM have an impact on their fellow citizens who are invested in SMOTE? This is another way of asking: what are the policy implications of the SSSM? and how can they be skillfully phrased and effectively translated into the world of post-Darwinian scholarship? To try and answer the questions, I will venture some remarks on a very limited personal experience of working with revisions of the SSSM in an effort to affect the SMOTE and hence the real world whose rule book it underlies in general. I fear the result will be unsatisfactory: confused and at least anecdotal. Not only confused, but also marked by the ambiguity of describing what is the ambiguity of social life, especially in large human organizations. If there is confusion, it derives from the fact that social scientists with a sense of the depth of the effect of evolution have to be like cubist painters: they have to be able to see the same scene from different perspectives all at once. So the cubist nose on the portrait is in the wrong place and looks weird. But who says that stereoscopic vision is the only proper way to look at faces and noses? No one should, just as no one should have claimed in A. D. 1066 that what you saw was with absolute certainty what you got, before microscopes or telescopes. Then what are the new lens like, of which this volume boasts? And what does it show? Let me describe a few vignettes. Sleeping With a few colleagues, who shall remain nameless (and very likely known to readers of this volume), I was part of an advisory group brought in to a major drug company to try to understand the resistance and even ruckus that accompanied a particular go-to-sleep potion they had hoped to sell for an infinity of money and with which they had already some lucrative if controversial success.

Policy Implications of the SSSM

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There was in our gathering first a bizarre admission that the arrival of outside consultants was the stimulus for the first-ever meeting of all the heads of the departments of the company, who were decisive in getting public acceptance and sales of a product that could make or possibly break the old and rich company. Now they were all in the same room for the first time since confronting this crisis and I asked what was the advantage of this drug they were perturbed about but which generated bags of money for the shareholders. The drug, they said, made people go to sleep. Certainly, this is a fair enough accomplishment for a sleeping drug. But then I had an anti-SSSM insight and announced that perhaps their clients didn’t want to sleep. Sleep was a behavior, presumably one about which there was some human choice. Perhaps they didn’t want to sleep with the person with whom they normally conducted this performance. Or their partner de jour or de nuit. Or perhaps they didn’t want to sleep at all because either sleeping was awful or being awake was fine. In essence, rather than view sleep as an autonomic matter like breathing—which to some extent of course it is—it also seemed valuable to understand that even a seemingly straightforward biological process could be subject to a variety of social influences and have complex social implications. Sleeping was more than tuning out. The attending drug-meisters were kind of stunned. As a matter of fact so was I because I had never before thought of sleeping as a behavior. But that is what it is. Such as it was, my insight derived from remembering the fastidiousness with which other primates chose their sleeping covey, with whom they arrange their nest or space. A lesson from primatology is that sleeping involves choice, discernment, confidence, and a sense of self. And surely a major source of disrespect endured by homeless people is their lack of control over where they sleep. In any event, sleep is an activity that occupies as much as 40 percent of the daily routine. Presumably the impulse to manage it medically is far more a matter than turning on or off the valves producing sleep. Sometimes people take medication to go to sleep because they have ingested other substances such as coffee, alcohol, or drugs designed to stimulate them while they’re awake. Or they may consume other drugs like Prozac to provide them some temporary exile from the perturbations of their lives—another major behavioral disruption. So simple pharmacology is not enough to understand the meaning and impact of substances people use. This is specially so with those emanating from the medical profession because this perforce attaches them to a vague but pervasive system of power over individual lives, which is perhaps analogous to or a replacement for religious authority that is far more common.

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Controlling Birth But sleep medication is only one of the agents of intervention into other peoples’ lives tolerated if not authorized by the SSSM. The story of another was the empirical core of my book, The Decline of Males (Tiger, 1999). In short, it reflected a question and an attempt to answer it. When the birth control pill was put into wide circulation I began to think: what’s the effect on males of this medication? After all, the pill works because it turns a female chemically pregnant, so she can’t become pregnant. It also enabled women and men to enjoy relatively risk-free sexual congress without obvious devices such as the condom. However would Mother Nature urge males to seek copulations with females who were already pregnant and thus unable to reward the avid male with the genetic replication that we have to assume is the ultimate cause of the turbulence? With colleagues at the Rutgers Medical School we conducted a study of the sexual behavior of vervet monkeys living on a small island off Bermuda. We established the “normal” behavior of the group over a period of three months. This involved the dominant male having exclusive sexual rights over his three favorites of the nine adult females in the group. Then with three-month doses of subcutaneous Depo-Provera we medicated five of the sexually active females. Then we medicated the other four. And then all. The result was that the otherwise erotically exuberant male did not copulate with any of the females on medication even though he repeatedly approached them in the good old way that had been so luscious before. Clearly he had no idea their deep natural state had changed and that for his purposes they were reproductively unemployable. Yet some form of pheromonal or similar interaction had obviously interfered with his enthusiasm. When the drug (again, given in three-month subcutaneous doses) washed out, he returned to his original three favorites. True love was restored. The Pill had an impact on monkey males. So why not on human ones? For example, the Pill achieved widespread distribution in 1963. Ten years later a wave of counterintuitive legislation hit country after country. Roe vs. Wade in 1973 in the United States, in the United Kingdom, France, Holland, and so on. Why would there be more demand for legal abortion after a good contraceptive that should have made it unnecessary was available and rather cheap? And why should the number of unmarried mothers spike drastically, to—now—a third of all births in the major industrial societies? Why such seemingly improbable consequences—more legal abortions and more single mothers—of an effective, safe, and relatively inexpensive way of controlling unwanted pregnancy? Why all this when planning and timing


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pregnancy were more easily accomplished among sexually active people than any time in human history? Because those who marketed and evaluated the Pill used the SSSM. They were its victims. They did not understand its profound disruption of the core Darwinian process, reproduction. They neither foresaw nor expected how drastically and fundamentally the Pill changed the balance of responsibility and decision in this most central of natural interactions. Evidently, no one thought imaginatively or parsimoniously about the behavioral consequences of promoting a drug affecting a core process of robust and healthy people for as many as 25–30 years. Not only that, the process of sexual selection that was characteristically based on both participants could be now controlled by only one party, the female. And unlike the condom and the diaphragm, which were visible in their use, the ingestion of the Pill was a private and secret matter. Had she or hadn’t she? Which male could know for sure? As I noted in Decline, men were now alienated from the means of reproduction. The result was fewer men than ever “did the right thing” and married women with whom they had sex and who became pregnant—from parish and other records we can reasonably assume that at least a third of marriages in the early part of the twentieth century occurred during a pregnancy. For one thing, the males now lacked what biologists know is a driving concern of male animals—paternity certainty. Why should they now gamble on the lineage of an offspring for whom they would have to provide time and resources for a generation? Since males had lost some major measure of control of the sexual encounter, they also cast off responsibility. So their pregnant partners had only three options. Giving up the child for adoption, which was a relatively rare choice. Or having an abortion—hence Roe vs. Wade. Or having the child—the boom in single mothers. That was that. In 1971, Martha McClintock published data showing that females living together in dormitories synchronized their menstrual cycles by the end of the school year (McClintock, 1971). However those who were on the Pill did not. Because they were already technically and chemically pregnant, they were interactively autonomous. But if the Pill had an effect on how females affected each other, surely there was the possibility that the more obvious effect would result—that it would affect the links between the medicated females and the males who were the focus of the pharmaceutical intervention. A Darwinian lens would have illuminated the essence of the issue. But this didn’t fit either the SSSM or the SMOTE. It took half a life cycle to understand the many factors in the story. It is in retrospect astonishing how long it took to learn about the effect of the contraceptive pill that made

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women pregnant, on the men with whom they had sex without wishing to become pregnant. Anyone with even a smattering of Darwinian insight could have seen that this pharmaceutical experiment would have consequences that were potentially both unforeseen and major—in fact given traditional morality and family patterns, almost catastrophic. Controlling Killing One of the most interesting experiences I have had as an academic has been consulting for the Department of Defense in Washington. The connection began when an official in the office of the Secretary of Defense, Andrew Marshall, contacted me. Marshall was trained as an economist at the University of Chicago and was in process of developing a discipline of strategic analysis that came to be called “Net Assessment”—essentially the paringaway of predictable variables2 until the reality at the heart of a military encounter or relationship was revealed. He became interested in the material on animal behavior, particularly when he worked with Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger who was an avid bird watcher and who was intrigued by natural social systems. Among the books they both had read was Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative (Ardrey, 1971). I had known Ardrey after I wrote him a letter about his African Genesis (Ardrey, 1960) to which he replied. We maintained a correspondence. Once when he had completed filming on the picture Khartoum in which Laurence Olivier starred and for which Ardrey wrote the script and was going to be in London where I was on a fellowship, he suggested we have dinner. This we did to my sense of astonished luxury at the Grill of the Savoy Hotel. He had been in contact with Secretary Schlesinger and I suspect he told Marshall about my book with Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal (Tiger and Fox, 1971a). In any event, this relationship has led to an intricate, fascinating, and I hope useful expedition into the realms of military and strategic thinking and action. The 9/11 attacks on the continental United States has had an appreciable impact even in the academic community on the level of interest in and acceptance of the study of military matters. It’s clear that we with our fellow primates inhabit a potentially dangerous neighborhood. If violence and aggression are genetically or social generated is an SSSM argument of great vintage, it is clearly irrelevant to the real world’s display of murderousness and seemingly senseless militarism. In fact, if the origin of aggression is social, as many protagonists of the SSSM have asserted, then the sophisticated cultural animal we are supposed to be is in deeper jeopardy than we have thought. The Christian Scientists of


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sociology who hold the exclusively culturalist view are of no help. It is inexcusable to fail to pursue scientifically every possible reason for human bellicosity, from the endocrine system to in-group out-group symbolism to religious beliefs that sanction killing nonbelievers to the need for water to the turbulence of young primate males seeking a place in the reproductive and political sun. The SSSM has failed to provide such a generous and firmly plausible conspectus on dire macrosocial events such as war. Given the primacy in various situations and communities of military activities, the link between bioscience and practical behavior is close and redolent. Whether it produces pro-social or otherwise benign results is not for me to say. However it seems inescapable that parsimonious thought about vast, dangerous, mighty matters can’t be all bad.

Conclusion In l965 Robin Fox and I spent three days talking in his office in the London School of Economics about the impending threat to the social sciences of the new work in genetics, neurophysiology, primatology, and the behavioral sciences of nature. We then wrote and published an impudent but still-pertinent assertion called “The Zoological Perspective in Social Science” (Tiger and Fox, 1971b). At that time, it seemed remarkable that there remained a firm division in universities between natural and social sciences, which delivered the implication that social behavior was somewhat not natural. But of course it is. And it remains a challenge to those who would better understand human behavior, and of other species too, to broaden their perspectives at the same time as they engage in the more typical scientific direction, which is to greater and greater detail. The planet is round even if it usually seems flat.

Notes 1. Typically, others such as religious managers or journalists specialize in such generalizations. While their impact may be real their principal goal is to affect behavior, not to affect ideas and theories about behavior. 2. Marshall is Director of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

References Ardrey, Robert. (1960). African Genesis. New York: Atheneum. Ardrey, Robert. (1971). The Territorial Imperative. New York: Atheneum.

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McClintock, Martha. (1971). Menstrual synchrony and suppression. Nature 229: 244–245. Tiger, Lionel. (1999). The Decline of Males. New York: Golden Books. Tiger, Lionel and Robin Fox. (1971a). The Imperial Animal. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Tiger, Lionel and Robin Fox. (1971b). The zoological perspective in social science. Man: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1: 75–81.

PART 2

Implications for Domestic Policy


CHAPTER 3

Prostitution—An Evolutionary Perspective Michael McGuire and Margaret Gruter

Although their reasons for entering prostitution may differ, streetwalking women have similarly decided (either consciously or not) to engage in life-threatening, abusive, exploitative activities where, according to O’Neill (1997), “they participate in their own annihilation.” (Dailia, 2000) I want to debunk the myth, that pervades, that prostitution is something that degrades women, and makes us feel demeaned, and that desire is motivated with men to exploit women and degrade them, and have demeaning sex acts that they couldn’t get with their wives . . . The reasons people seek out prostitutes, is not for desire for sex, it is for desire to feel better about themselves. And, in my positive response to them, even as a prostitute, I make them feel better about themselves. (Chris Wallace’s Internet Expose: SexECommerce, ABC News, July 12, 2001) Introduction

P

rostitution is defined as the act of engaging in sex for money. But it is hardly that simple. “Sex workers”—a current term for those who sell sex for money—their clients, their managers, and their procurers offer

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up a microcosm of the human condition imbued with a wide range of sexual behaviors, financial arrangements, criminal behavior, satisfactions, dissatisfactions, abuses, and exploitations. Attempts to eliminate or control sex for pay date back at least 2,000 years. Still, prostitution continues to flourish over much of the world and recent reports suggest that both the number of prostitutes and the number of clients are increasing. This chapter asks the question, “Does looking at prostitution from an evolutionary perspective lead to insights about its causes, its longevity, and the seeming inability to control or eradicate it?” We begin with a review of basic facts about prostitution. Next we discuss behavioral variances, common fallacies, and social issues. An evolutionary perspective on prostitution follows. Attempts to control prostitution and current debates are then described. The chapter concludes with a discussion of policy implications. Some Basic Facts In the United States there are an estimated 300,000–1,300,000 sex workers. Approximately 90 percent are female, 10 percent male, and less than 1 percent transsexual. Reports differ regarding the percentages of prostitutes who are streetwalkers, who work alone with known clients, who work through agencies (e.g., social escorts, call girls), and who work through businesses (e.g., sex clubs, massage parlors) (DeCou, 1998; Clements, 1996). Estimates range between 20 and 80 percent for streetwalkers (Berkman, 1996; Drexler, 1996; DeCou, 1998). Until perhaps 30 years ago prostitution was primarily an occupation of women whose ages were bracketed by their reproductive years. However, since the mid-1970s, the number of pre-reproductive female sex workers (ages 6–15) has increased, particularly in Asia where an extensive child prostitution and child pornography business currently thrives—there are an estimated 1,000,000 child prostitutes in India, Thailand, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines (Berkman, 1996). Indeed, throughout much of Asia the sex industry, which includes sexual slavery, is so pervasive that its economic import and its contribution to GNPs (2–14%) are frequent topics in financial magazines (Asian Economic News, August 24, 1998). The United States is not exempt from these practices. Child prostitution and child pornography are on the increase and the U.S. State Department estimates that 50,000–100,000 women and children are trafficked into the United States each year, many of whom become prostitutes (Peratis, 2000). Although sexual intercourse is often thought to be the primarily sex act of prostitutes and their clients, in practice literally every imaginable type of sex

Evolutionary Perspective of Prostitution

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act takes place, for example, sexual intercourse, submissive acts, masochistic and sadistic acts, cross-dressing, and public display (e.g., prostitute as “girl friend”). Drug use and drug dependency are common. There is a “prostitution hierarchy” ranging from highly paid social escorts to poorly paid streetwalkers. Financial contracts between prostitutes and their clients vary from one-time payments for a single sexual encounter to financial arrangements stretching over years. When involved, procurers (“pimps”), sex-agency managers, and traffickers charge for their services. Prostitutes high up in the hierarchy often report that they enjoy their activities—see second quotation earlier. Those at the bottom of the hierarchy report the opposite—see first quotation earlier. The list of basic facts is short. It is short in part because facts are hard to get. And it is short in part because a close look at what is known and seemingly factual about prostitution reveals that the reasons for becoming a prostitute and using the services of prostitutes, the conditions that contribute to these behaviors, and what participants feel about their behavior, cover such a wide spectrum that generalizations serve to distort as much as to inform (Sera, 1997). Variance, Common Fallacies, and Social Constraints Variance Two types of variance will be discussed, prostitution hierarchy and clients’ sexual appetites. At the top of the economic and personal safety hierarchy are sex workers who either have their own clientele or who work with agencies that screen potential clients for their ability to pay and their behavior. Call girls and social escorts make up this category. They are well paid for their work. There is a low probability of physical or verbal abuse. And prostitute–client relationships may extend over years (Thompson, 2000). At the bottom of the economic and safety hierarchy are streetwalkers whose work experience and fortunes are the opposite of call girls and escorts. They are poorly paid. They are often subject to physical and verbal abuse as well as exploitive activities such as rape and theft (O’Neill, 1997). Reports suggest that greater than 60 percent of streetwalkers have been abused physically, over 40 percent have been raped (this includes female, male, and transsexual prostitutes), and over 40 percent suffer from symptoms consistent with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Baldwin, 1999; Valera, 2000). Abuse and harassment by the police are far from infrequent occurrences. Between these extremes a myriad of arrangements exist that connect providers and clients (e.g., massage parlors, sex clubs, Internet advertising), sex acts, and financial arrangements.

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Clients’ sexual appetites include masochistic and sadistic acts, cross-dressing, submissive acts, torture, and drug use along with more conventional forms of sex, such as petting and sexual intercourse. When appetites are examined in detail, two unexpected findings emerge. First, over 50 percent of arrangements between clients and call girls do not include sexual intercourse. Social companionship or “atypical” sexual acts (e.g., torture) are what is paid for. This point may in part explain why legal and social approaches to controlling prostitution have been ineffective. It is difficult to legislate successfully against social companionship and it may be equally difficult to suppress atypical sexual desires. Second, both prostitutes and their clients show a surprising willingness to disregard health risks. Common Fallacies A commonly held view is that prostitution can be explained primarily as sex or sexual favors for money or other resources. Literally all reports support this view. There are exceptions, however. At times, sex, money, intimacy, and caring relationships intermix. “. . . relations between workers sometimes blur the imaginary borders between sex as work and sex as more intimate personal, emotional, or romantic relationships. Among certain sex workers, especially in more developed countries such as France, the desire to have sex with men makes, at times, the need for money become a secondary reason for prostitution” (Fernandez-Alemany, 2000). Nevertheless, money and other resources remain critical and most likely the main factors in the majority of sexual encounters and certainly in the ancillary parts of the sex industry (e.g., procurement, trafficking, drug dependency). A second fallacy is that prostitutes are from the lower socioeconomic class. For the majority of prostitutes this appears to be the case. They come from families with less than average income. However, there are also prostitutes who come from the economic and social middle and upper classes. Entry into the sex industry may be voluntary or involuntary. The need for resources for day-to-day expenses and the support of drug habits, sexual slavery, and the sale of children by their families are all well-documented involuntary reasons. Voluntary reasons are still poorly understood. Prostitution prospers because of oversexed males, because female prostitutes enjoy the control they have over their male clients, because prostitutes have the “good life” (e.g., sex, money, and free time), and only wealthy males engage prostitutes. None of these sometimes-stated generalizations appears to be correct. There is no compelling evidence that the majority of male clients are oversexed although their sexual appetites may range well beyond the norm, that the majority of female prostitutes enjoy control over their


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clients, that the majority of prostitutes—especially those low in the prostitute hierarchy—have the good life, or that wealthy males are the majority of clients. Social Issues To what degree do social mores drive prostitution? Consider the oftenconstraining effects of socially condoned and legally controlled male–female relationships such as marriage. Marriage is about sex, but it is also about having and raising children, social status, resource acquisition and use, and meeting dependency and security needs of spouses, children, and relatives. These are not uncomplicated matters or always easily achieved. Moreover, they often disrupt sexual relationships between spouses, particularly in Western European and U.S. societies where a limited view of acceptable sexual behavior among married couples often prevails. Engaging the services of a prostitute provides an alternative. It offers the promise of short-term pleasure without the long-term effort, responsibility, and cost of marriage and having offspring (Shuster, 1992). Further, it doesn’t carry the exposure and embarrassment implications that frequently occur when one engages in sex with family friends or at the office. The continuing presence of prostitution need not be attributed primarily to the complexity and demands of marriage, but it is unlikely that troublesome marriages are inconsequential among a percentage of male clients. There are of course other social factors. For example, some individuals have difficulty finding a mate, being cared for, or satisfying their sexual appetites with spouses or others. Again, prostitution provides an alternative. There are also individuals who gain pleasure from disregarding or disobeying social rules and laws. Approximately 5 percent of the male population falls into this category and possibly 2 percent of the female population (Mealey, 1996). “Sociopath” and “psychopath” are the terms commonly used to describe such individuals. However one may view their behavior, these individuals have sexual desires and these desires are often fulfilled with unwitting non-prostitutes as well as prostitutes. Although no data are available, sociopaths seem a likely source of many of the exploitative incidents reported by prostitutes. In addressing social issues, it is important to note that attitudes and tolerances toward prostitution differ significantly across time and societies. For example, prostitutes were often accorded social respect in Ancient Greece and Rome (Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, 1974). Further, societies across the globe differ in their views about male and female self-control with Asian, Western European/United States, South American, and sub-Saharan

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African nations providing the greatest contrasts. In Muslim societies prostitution is forbidden. Yet, in certain locations, Mut’a, which is a form of temporary marriage, may be practiced (Nagar, 2000)—critics claim that such behavior is an attempt to give prostitution a face of respectability. Attitudes and tolerances, particularly those associated with moral or political imperatives, frequently find their way into research. For example, an often-reported finding is that the majority of women who are streetwalkers were emotionally deprived or abused as children (Dailia, 2000; Valera, 2000). While evidence clearly suggests that abuse is a major contributing factor among a large percentage of streetwalkers, there is no firm evidence that it is a contributing factor among the majority of prostitutes and particularly those higher up in the prostitution hierarchy. Further, prostitutes may find “deprivation” and “abuse” convenient ideological currencies to explain their behavior. Different sociocultural attitudes are further reflected in a recent decision by Brazilian brothels to advertise through the Internet (Emerging Markets Week, September 3, 2001), in Holland’s decision to legitimize brothels in the hope of registering sex workers and applying strict safety and health standards (New Statesman, April 26, 1999), and in the increasing number of advocates in the United Kingdom favoring the legalization of prostitution and of narcotics in order to reduce illegal drug traffic and improve health and safety standards. An Evolutionary Perspective on Prostitution An obvious implication of the preceding discussion is that a simple evolutionary interpretation of prostitution will not be forthcoming. There is too much variance in the behavior of prostitutes and their clients, in the systems that facilitate and support prostitution, and in the social and legal approaches to expect easy answers. In considering the many faces of prostitution, the first point to stress is within-species variance or, as it is sometimes called, evolutionary variance. Evolutionary variance is an inevitable product of sexually mating species where genes from both mates contribute to individual and sex differences. Examples of cross-person differences include eye and skin color, intelligence, and neuroticism. Examples of sex differences include anatomical, physiological, and maturation differences and the capacity to bear children. It is assumed that within-species variance has served Homo sapiens well in the distant past in response to both unpredictable and often catastrophic environmental changes and competitive encounters by allowing some members of the


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species (e.g., those with special attributes) to survive. The terms natural selection and sexual selection are applied to these processes. But an important footnote is that these forms of selection do not promise perfection. Thus, for example, there are many genetically influenced traits that are far from ideal (e.g., the human eye; Nesse and Williams, 1994). There are well over 1,000 genetically influenced diseases. And, in the field of mental health, there is mental retardation, Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, substance abuse as well as a number of other disorders that appear to be influenced genetically (see R. Blank, chapter 5, in this volume). Two important implications accompany the evolutionary variance perspective. First, there will be a subset of any population that will desire to engage in law-breaking behavior, sexual and financial exploitation, and sexual and physical abuse. There is compelling evidence that such individuals exist, that the more successful individuals thrive, and that they reproduce (Mealey, 1996). The second implication concerns within-species variance without implications of criminality. A percentage of any generation will be both capable of and satisfied with a life of prostitution or using the services of prostitutes. Personal preferences, sexual preferences, tolerance of others’ behavior, attitudes toward one’s body, and personal motivations are relevant here. Said differently, there are appetites and preferences outside of the normal range and these may find a ready acceptance in the many faces of prostitution. Evolutionary-oriented investigators have documented similarities and differences between the sexes for both sex-related strategies and sexual appetites. These differences have been discussed in detail elsewhere (e.g., Buss, 1994) and they will be reviewed only briefly here. Similarities will be discussed first. Both sexes have dispositional tendencies to reproduce, and reproductionrelated behavior (e.g., flirting, experimentation with one another’s bodies) begins during adolescence. Both sexes show some degree of discrimination regarding the persons with whom they experiment and members of both sexes are capable of finding pleasure and personal fulfillment in sexual activity—because of its somatic and psychological effects, sex is often pleasurable. And both sexes are generally aware of the social rules applying to sexual behavior although their willingness to follow such rules varies. In effect, both sexes are predisposed and well prepared to engage in sexual behavior. It follows that attempts to control sexual behavior will be only partially successful, a point to which the high frequency of teenage sexual encounters, abortions, and adult extramarital affairs attests. In this context, prostitution and using the services of a prostitute are options for operationalizing dispositional tendencies.

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Differences between the sexes are more relevant to the aims of this chapter, however. There are the obvious anatomical differences. Females control male access to their bodies except in situations of rape or abuse. And males cannot be certain that offspring are theirs while females can. Preference differences are equally critical. On average, males are inclined to seek out more than one female to satisfy their sexual desires, and for a large percentage of males sexual encounters are psychologically decoupled from possible relationship permanence. Males generally prefer younger than older or same-age females and they prefer attractive to unattractive females. Females are more inclined to engage in sexual activity with potential mates and, more than males, focus on finding long-term partners. Same age or older men are preferable to younger males, at least among women in their early reproductive years. And male attractiveness, although probably secondary to a potential mate’s available resources, is still a factor in mate choice. Male sexual dispositions and within-sex variance can be specified with respect to male demands for prostitution. (1) Male evolved desire for sexual variety (variety of different sexual partners). (2) Male evolved desire for young and physically attractive female partners (this desire often extends to pre-reproductive females). (3) Males who are unable to obtain matings in any other ways (i.e., males that are unattractive to females). (4) Males who use prostitutes to engage in sex acts that they cannot indulge in with current sex partners (a byproduct explanation). A similar analysis can be applied to females who engage in prostitution. (1) Female desire for short-term mating (while lower than males, the desire is present). (2) Exploiting male sexual desires for resources (probably recurrent over evolutionary history). (3) Being forced into prostitution through male coercion or force. (4) Using prostitution as a means of supporting a drug habit (unlikely to have a long evolutionary history). The preceding points permit the prediction that males will be less constrained than females to engage prostitutes. For their part, females, because they tend to view sex as part of longer-term relationships, will be constrained from becoming prostitutes. Both predictions are consistent with available data. The number of male clients far exceeds the number of female prostitutes. While these points help explain why some women enter prostitution and why males often seek the services of prostitutes, they fail to explain why many prostitutes tolerate abuse by their clients. There is no easy answer to this question. Mental illness, excessive interpersonal dependency, drug habit, slavery, and the inability to obtain or sustain other types of economic work have been suggested and in some instances documented. For this group economic needs appear to be the major factor.


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Attempts at Control and Current Debates Social and legal attempts to address prostitution range from authorization by public agencies to police work to stop it. Criminalization, decriminalization, and legalization are the main control alternatives. Moral, political, and historical issues intermesh with these alternatives. No one approach has been entirely successful. The justification for criminalization builds from the idea of shared public morality, namely it is a threat to the institution of marriage, and it endangers the health of those that participate (Law, 2000). Enforcement is costly, however. Moreover, the criminalization approach assumes that sex for pay will be constrained significantly if there are legal consequences. This seems doubtful. For example, it is estimated that in the United States more than $40,000,000 per day is spent on prostitution and that there are at least 1,500,000 visits to prostitutes each week (Snell, 1994; Fakhar, 2002). Moreover, when prostitution goes “underground,” which has been the typical response to criminalization, an increase in both prostitution and criminal behavior is the likely byproduct (Smith, 2000). The justification for decriminalization builds from the idea that prostitution is not immoral and that sex work should be left to the judgment of individuals. Females are free to choose the use of their bodies. Those opposed to this view argue that decriminalization without monitoring for diseases and abuse poses a significant and costly health risk to society. The justification for legalization is driven by health motives. Advocates support the removal of restrictions on commercial sex while attempting to ensure that sex workers are licensed, registered, and are checked for health problems. Holland and the state of Nevada, both of which practice legalization, report a significant reduction in the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS. Ideological approaches enter the discussion because they influence legislation, policy, and enforcement. The radical feminist approach, an approach with a strong commitment to human rights, opposes prostitution for a variety of reasons. Commercial sex is often forced and non-consensual among teenage prostitutes—the modal age for starting sex work is 14 years (Baldwin, 1999) but it is declining yearly. Prostitutes are frequently raped or assaulted, and there are long-term health and psychological costs to prostitution (Clements, 1996). Liberal feminists argue that criminalizing prostitution is to deny that sex could be a source of pleasure for women and thereby negates women’s sexuality. Further, it marginalizes women for whom prostitution is an alternative in the labor market. It is not clear if liberal feminists favor decriminalization or legalization.

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Policy Implications We began this chapter by asking, “Does looking at prostitution from an evolutionary perspective lead to insights about its causes, its longevity, and the seeming inability to control or eradicate it?” Some insights have emerged including different sexual dispositions and intensities among males and females, different male and female sexual appetites, and the willingness of a percentage of individuals to engage in sex irrespective of the consequences. An implication of evolutionary variance is that it is unlikely that the sexual appetites of the majority of individuals that engage prostitutes will suddenly change. Further, an analysis of evolved dispositions suggests that males will continue to seek a range of sexual partners and, generally, the younger the partner the more desirable. For females, exploiting males for resources is likely an evolved trait. And then there are those who manage the prostitution business. For this group the likely evolved disposition is the desire for resources. It follows that it is quite improbable that prostitution can be fully controlled, no matter what the laws, the policies, the law enforcement techniques, or the consequences. If personal survival is excluded, sexual desires are probably as strongly motivated as any other desires. Given these points, limited legalization seems the best evolutionary-based relevant response. Limited legalization (e.g., registration of sex workers, regular health checkups) has the social advantages of reducing the transmission of diseases, perhaps reducing criminal involvement, and bringing sex workers into the work force. But there are other sides to the sex industry—the extremes—that we believe should fall outside of legalization. These include instances of abuse, sexual slavery, child prostitution, and illegal trafficking. Here, legal restraints are recommended. The task of carrying out these recommendations would be enormous. An effective strategy to control and suppress the extremes would require a detailed plan of action at legislative, policy, enforcement, and educational levels. Such a plan would have to address the costs and consequences of socially and legally managing extreme behaviors at the national, state, and local levels with the potential social and individual benefits should the plan be successful. Taxpayers, legislators, and law enforcement personnel would have to be convinced of the value of such a plan. It is unclear if the motivation to carry out such a plan currently exists. Turning to international issues, a hint at the enormity of the task is provided by data dealing with the sex industry in Thailand. Approximately 5,000,000 people visited Thailand during the mid-1990s of which an estimated


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two-thirds were “sex tourists” and 10 percent were “child sex tourists” (Berkman, 1996; Hodgson, 1994). When such findings are added to the trafficking data, locational data (where prostitutes are available), and sex slave data, suppression at one location or in one country is likely to be minimally effective in reducing extreme behaviors elsewhere. A global approach to managing prostitution thus seems as unlikely as it seems unrealistic. Nevertheless, it is possible to address prostitution at the national, state, and local levels. Holland and the state of Nevada have done so and report success in the registration of prostitutes and in reducing the frequency of sexually transmitted diseases. Laws, policies, and organizations that manage registration and test for diseases are required. Education to reduce the demand for prostitutes may also be partially effective. It has reduced the number of smokers and instances of spousal abuse—these are encouraging precedents. Acknowledgment We thank David Buss for his helpful comments on an earlier draft. References Baldwin, M. A. (1999). A million dollars and an apology: Prostitution and public benefits claims. Hastings Women’s Law Journal 10: 189–224. Berkman, E. T. (1996). Responses to the international child sex tourism trade. Boston College International Law Review 19: 397–422. Buss, D. (1994). The Evolution of Desire. New York: Basic Books. Clements, T. M. (1996). Prostitution and the American health care system: Denying access to a group of women in need. Berkeley’s Women Law Journal 49: 52–53. Dailia, R. L. (2000). Exposing the “pretty woman” myth: A qualitative examination of the lives of female streetwalking prostitutes. Journal of Sex Research November 2000. DeCou, K. (1998). U.S. social policy on prostitution: Whose welfare is served? New England Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement 24: 427–453. Drexler, J. N. (1996). Government’s role in turning tricks: The world’s oldest profession in the Netherlands and the United states. Dickson Journal of International Law 15: 201–236. Encyclopedia. (1974). Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica. Fakhar, A. (2002). Women’s sexual labor. Review paper prepared for the Gruter Institute, Portola Valley, CA. Fernandez-Alemany, M. (2000). Men who sell sex: International perspectives on male prostitution and HIV/Aids. Journal of Sex Research May 2002.

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Hodgson, D. (1994). Sex tourism and child prostitution in Asia: Legal responses to and strategies. Melbourne University Law Review 19: 512–537. Law, S. A. (2000). Commercial sex: Beyond criminalization. Southern California Law Review 73: 523–610. Mealey, L. (1996). The sociobiology of sociopathy. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17: 119–128. Nagar, R. (2000). Religion, race, and the debate over Mut’a in Dar es Salaam. Feminist Studies Fall 2000. Nesse, R. M. and G. C. Williams. (1994). Why We Get Sick. New York. Random House. O’Neill, M. (1997). Prostitute women now. In G. Scambler and A. Scambler (Eds.), Rethinking Prostitution: Purchasing Sex in the 1990s. London: Routledge. Peratis, K. (2000). Symposium on voluntary prostitution. Insights on the News, July 17, 2000. Sera, J. M. (1997). Surrogacy and prostitution: A comparative analysis. The American University Journal of Gender and the Law 5: 315–342. Shuster, K. (1992). On the oldest profession: A proposal in favor of legalized but regulated prostitution. University of Florida Journal of Law and Public Policy 5: 1–31. Smith, K. (2000). First blast of the strumpet. New Statesman March 6, 2000. Snell, J. G. (1994). Mandatory HIV testing and prostitution: The world’s oldest profession and the world’s newest deadly disease. Hastings Law Journal 45: 1565–1592. Thompson, S. E. (2000). Prostitution—A choice ignored. Women’s Rights Law Reporter 21: 217–247. Valera, R. J. (2000). Violence and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in a sample of inner city street prostitutes. American Journal of Health Studies Summer 2000.

CHAPTER 4

Relating to the Environment: Legacy and Learning Lynton Keith Caldwell

Introduction

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he “environment” as a focus for scholarly research and public policy has received legitimacy in academia and government in hardly more than a third of a century. My 1963 article “Environment: A Focus for Public Policy” was regarded as a path-breaker in defining the need for public policy to protect the environment (Caldwell, 1963). But except for limited support from conservation organizations, most philanthropic institutions were unwilling to support the development of this new field, which suggested the need for a new scientific model to account for the systemic complexity of the environment. Prior to the 1970s, the Standard Social Science Research Model was virtually unchallenged, as broader alternatives were considered unmanageable. During my undergraduate years at the University of Chicago, for example, it was taught that social sciences and the life sciences had nothing to do with one another. Sociology was the study of human social behavior, and biology was the study of nonhuman organisms. The “environment” was a subject for academic research only in the context of the social or technological environment. Yet even in biology, research, teaching on human morals and mores, was widely received with suspicion. Research and study in the genetics of intelligence, for example, was discouraged and repressed as prevailing opinion supported the proposition that there was nothing useful to learn from it. There was fear that research in the biological bases of behavior would uncover possible

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measurable criteria in the reasons why humans differ in their behavior or mental capacities, reinforcing potential “racist” discriminatory policies. Scholars of this cautious persuasion, however, should logically have opposed the human genome project, for who can foresee what “mischief ” may be hidden in its yet unknown findings? Today, however, there appears to be a convergence or synthesis of the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) with a broader, systems-based evolutionaryenvironmental approach to research in human behavior (e.g., Forrester, 1947; Laszlo, 1972; Boulding, 1985). We now have a viable alternative to develop an understanding of the relationships that French psychologist Claude Bernard called the “environment exteriéur” (the exterior environment) and the “milieu interéior” (the internal environment) (Bernard, 1957). This chapter is subsequently based on the belief that the SSSM for research is largely obsolete and applicable to only a small number of discrete social issues that need not be linked to the broader and dynamic multiloop nonlinear feedback “ambience” of the Earth. But demonstrating the obsolescence of the SSSM is likely to lead to broader social and political implications and impacts, especially induced by the environmental movement. In his book Prejudices (1982) sociologist Robert Nisbet declared “it is entirely possible that when the history of the twentieth century is finally written, the single most important social movement of the period will be judged to be environmentalism” (Nisbet, 1982: 101). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Nisbet’s assessment might seem unrealistic and exaggerated. Movements relating to civil rights, race, gender, world trade, and international conflict might seem more important. His conjecture, however, was “when the history of the twentieth century is finally written.” If the historiography of past centuries is indicative, an evaluative perspective on the twentieth century is unlikely to be written before the late twenty-first century. Environmental study is a concept in evolution and the effects of global change—notably of climate, resource depletion, and demographic pressures—make responsive changes to be expected in expressions of human behavior and public policy. Updating our perceptions and priorities to include broader (and more accurate) scientific and mental models based on a multidimensional systemic environment appears to be the most important consequence for research and study in the environment (e.g., the emerging study of Earth Systems Science) and its implications for public policy. Changes would be required in both the veritable institutions of humanity and more importantly, in the mental processes and assumptions of the mind.

Relating to the Environment

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Scoping Environmentalism: Comprehending the Environment The Oxford Reference Dictionary (1986) defines “environment” as “surroundings, especially as affecting people’s lives; conditions, or circumstances of living.” The definition is, unfortunately, not wholly adequate. It provides no indication of the true scope and complexity of humankind’s environmental relationships. The environment is much more than “things out there.” Comprehensions by peoples of the true scope and complexity of their environments have been limited by the insufficiency of science, by available investigative technologies, and by ideology. Nevertheless, our ability to perceive appears to be expanding to include the microcosmic, induced from microbiology and medicine; and the macrocosmos, a consequence of the exploration of outer space and spectacular advances in astronomy and astrophysics. Through historiography, evidence of awareness and respect for the forces comprising the natural environment have been documented, as also in art and more recently in the sciences of climatology, geology, anthropology, archaeology, and paleontology. Prehistoric environmental concern was expressed in cave paintings, myth, and ritual. Primitive man, however, had little choice beyond propitiation of the deities of nature—for he could not command their obedience. Pseudo-science, for example, alchemy, focused on a small part of the physical world—and legend, myth, and theology provided explanations and accounts of the creation of the Earth and cosmos. The roots of “modern” environmentalism, however, appear to extend little deeper than the seventeenth century, exemplified in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon that nature, to be commanded, must first be obeyed. The dominant theme in Bacon’s time and into the eighteenth century, however, was a pursuit of understanding the workings of nature to benefit humanity (Eisley, 1962; Farrington, 1949). By the nineteenth century, however, opposition to the negative consequences of this perspective, manifest in industrialism, was expressed in the poetry of William Blake and in the anti-industrial actions of the Luddites. By the twenty-first century, the state of the environment has become a major moral, medical, aesthetic, scientific, and political issue of multinational dimensions. It was the focus of several international conferences such as the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm) and the establishment of the United Nations Environment Programme; the 1982 United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro)—and numerous other conferences and reports from transnational institutions, far too numerous to mention here.

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During the pre-Stockholm decade, agencies for environmental protection were established in all major industrialized countries. Leading the way have been volunteer nongovernmental organizations such as the World Conservation Union, The World Wildlife Fund, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace, among many others that have multinational memberships and encompass the globe. Despite such unprecedented popular concern for protecting the environment, the broad inclusive scope of the environment and environmental policy makes it elusive for precise analysis and comprehension by many people. Attitudes and behaviors in relation to environmental issues differ widely. The issues, which are numerous, are almost never solely environmental, often complicated by policy matters that involve other interests, values, and the economy (Forrester, 1971). In this short chapter we can therefore do no more than provide a few representative examples of environment-related issues. There are discernible patterns of response that characterize human relationships to their environments. I prefer to conceptualize these relationships, defined as the environment, as a complex, multidimensional phenomenon characterized by feedback relationships between the stimulus and response among the inner biological processes of the brain, the behavior it elicits, and the ultimate feedback effects of that behavior external to the human body, which in turn create additional feedback stimuli. Using such a definition, it becomes possible to identify principle human behavioral patterns that characterize environmental relationships, a sequence simplified as: perception → assumption → behavioral response. Perceptions The Oxford Reference Dictionary (1986) defines “perceived” as “to become aware of with the mind or through one of the senses, to see or notice.” Humans are constantly engaged in perception through the senses. We see, hear, smell, taste, and feel using biological receptors in our body. And it would be safe to say that humans began perceiving no later than when they became fully human. Yet since that early amorphous prehistoric state, perceptions of the human environment have broadened substantially as applied science and discovery have correspondingly increased through technology. Today, for example, our perceptions of the environment have been substantially enlarged by the discovery of cosmic radiation imperceptible to the unaided eye but measurable by scientific instruments. And visual images of distant galaxies from the Hubble telescope have supplemented a process of cosmic perception accelerated after pictures of the “blue planet” were taken from the Apollo XI mission.


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From this understanding, “perception” is ultimately the foundation for identification of environmental relationships, which can occur at many different levels of complexity (e.g., cosmic, planetary, ecosystem, individual). However, even if the proper perceptual scale is applied, the problem then arises in how the biological processes of the brain interpret, or develop assumptions regarding these perceptions, that guide our interactions with the environment. It should also be noted that the human mind could create perception beyond demonstrable fact, yielding, for example, science fiction and surrealism in art and the theater. The simulation possibilities of television, the computer, and cinema open additional avenues for creating a belief that additional realms of perception exist through visual and auditory stimulation. Humans today are therefore capable of generating auditory and visual environments that have no veritable existence beyond the human mind. Erroneous Perceptions, Assumptions, and Belief To the extent that it is possible to guide our interactions with the environment, assumptions are therefore critical in linking perceptions of reality to behavior— as well as the consequence of that behavior. Our brain processes these perceptions and forms “opinions” about them. The cortex compares the perceived stimulus to relevant memory functions and includes this information in determining the appropriate behavioral response. Surely one of the greatest risks for humanity is to believe that imagined “mental images” that may create assumptions and guide behavior are adequate substitutes for realistic perceptions of the veritable environment. Our collective and subliminal memory functions, however, are interactive artifacts of our culture and the archives of thousands of years of cultural and biological evolution, including a more recent but now changing assumption of the separateness of humanity from its environment. Our expectations of what has, will, or may happen, now tend to follow from our assumption of the tendencies and possibilities inherent in the environment, of which we are now acknowledged to be an integral part. The history of mankind’s environmental errors records numerous disasters following from inadequate assumptions that place improvident reliance on assuming, believing, and behaving in a way based on preference (virtual reality) rather than the actual prevailing conditions (veritable reality). For example, villagers in Central America who built their homes on the slopes of volcanic mountains that they had deforested for economic gain suffered disaster when heavy tropical storms washed away their homes, creating avalanches of mud destroying all life in its path. And human beings continue to

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rely on depleting and polluting fossil fuels in the presence of viable alternatives despite confirmable evidence that such reliance is, among other consequences, altering the temperature and weather of the Earth (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2001). Examples are numerous, but the point here is that, to be credible, assumptions of humans regarding their environments must be kept as close to those actual environmental circumstances and events as they are able (e.g., to reality). These assumptions drive our behavior that can often create significant (and often unnecessary) human suffering when behavior is not consistent with prevailing external conditions. Such inconsistency of behavior with external circumstances creates, in effect, a gap between thinking and reality, defined hereafter as a delusion. This pattern of environmental relationships is, however, a feedback process between the mind and its external environment, which has often resulted in an environmental endgame if delusions are not modified through applied learning in a timely manner (Fagan, 1999). Probably the most egregious modern example of collective delusion is excessive material growth that degrades our life support systems. The “limits to growth” studies beginning with the Meadows report to the Club of Rome have not significantly altered obsessive commitments of governments and individuals to the unattainable state of perpetual expansion in a limited environment (Meadows et al., 1972; see also King and Schneider, 1991). These present-day conceits appear counterfactual and, based on the best available science that we have, may result in a “land slide” for the entire human species if continued much longer (World Scientist’s Warning to Humanity. Cambridge, Mass.: Union of Concerned Scientists, November 18, 1992).1 Degraded environmental circumstances caused by human activity are consequences of dangerous chains of reasoning grounded on the initial delusion that humanity and nature are distinct, separate entities and no meaningful connections exist between them. This assumption leads to a belief that nature may be domesticated to indefinitely serve human desires and its resources are infinitely substitutable. From this line of reasoning, humans become separate from, or more often exempt from, limit points that do exist for the “rest” of nature. It therefore becomes conceptually possible (although really impossible) for the human population and its economy to grow indefinitely on a finite planet. Of course, this delusion takes many different forms, manifest in a humanistic/technocratic delusion that technology and “the indomitable human spirit” can overcome deficiencies in nature created by deficiencies in human nature (Simon, 1980).2 Another example, probably more virulent, is the belief that humans are granted “divine” authority to dominate nature.


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The Contentious Course of Change Pre-science assumptions regarding human nature and the natural environment were often attached to communal consensus or to religious ideologies. Christianity, in particular, has entertained ambivalent attitudes toward nature, often conceptually separating humanity from “God” in the form of a superperson capable of intervening in human events on earth. Among early Christians, fanatics put the sacred groves of classical deities of nature “to the axe.” And even today, in the twenty-first century, some Christian conservatives regard the nature protection movement with suspicion and adherents as “tree huggers” who prefer wild animals to people. They also often combine religion with “patriotic economics,” echoing another assessment from Nisbet that the environmental movement is committed to replace capitalism with socialism (Nisbet, 1982). Given the widespread acceptance and subsequent economic utility of these and similar delusions, much of Western humanity, it appears, has been led to assume that they were to “domesticate” and “harness” nature solely for human purposes, seeing themselves as having a divine license to be exempt from the laws and limits that do govern the Earth, despite evidence that this is a delusional myth. Even today, iterations of these beliefs remain. James Watt, former secretary of the interior in the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, for example, held a strong religious conviction that the Earth and its resources were intended for use and development by humankind. It was apparent that he believed God’s intent that the environment was created for humans and that humans have a responsibility to harvest its proceeds and develop it to yield economic benefits to succeeding generations. To “lock up” material resources in timber, oil, minerals, and in national parks and wilderness areas, it appears, was reflective of his view that environmental protection was inconsistent with God’s intent for humanity. Citing the parable of two servants where one servant was punished for failing to return more money to his master than placed in his trust, Watt asked what answer would be given to our “master” on his second coming for failure to develop and increase the “wealth” of the Earth given to our charge? Given the dominance of similar assumptions during the era of scientific development and enlarging perceptions, it should not be surprising that the conservation and environmental protection movements were a late arrival and emerged only as the damaging effects of destructive exploitation of nature from these secular and religious delusions became evident. It follows

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that changes in assumptions and behavior would need to follow, having significant implications for public policy and governance. Implications for Human Society and Governance Unmoved by the transient character of civilizations past, the twentieth century from its outset was shaped by an assumption of permanence and unprecedented growth of people and power, expressed in the arrogance of human ambition to “conquer” and “direct” nature. The release of atomic energy; the entry into outer space; phenomenal developments in the technologies of computation; communication; medicine; over-consumption of nonrenewable natural resources; and opening of new environments to exploitation were developments having profound implications—positive and negative— for human perceptions and assumptions. Near the end of the twentieth century, the pressure of people and technology on the environment had become global and was beginning to arouse apprehensions among people who foresaw its implications. All life forms, however, are carriers of the evolutionary legacy of the substance of organic life. Before the advent of evolutionary biology, humans were more cognizant of the differences among species than of their common characteristics, which were less visible. Of course throughout historic time there have been people and persons who have seen nature whole. Yet they have been the exception, not the ordinary, in human society (Fowles, 1979). Humans are, however, the only species that can simultaneously and consciously protect and destroy the living systems of the Earth. This is a broad responsibility, and we argue that by the end of the twentieth century, a sense of the need to safeguard the future will likely give way to a new “natural” and syncretic consciousness in the twenty-first century.3 Research in changing perceptions and values in the “developed” countries of Western Europe and in North America indicate that concepts of environmental quality and sustainability have been merging into the social ethos of these countries (Andrews, 1999). There is furthermore hope that a comprehension gap between youth and elders may confirm rationally responsible leadership in governing our assumptions and behavior in a twenty-first–century globalizing society. However, many older people in positions of power are accustomed to past assumptions and practices and remain skeptical of restrictions affecting property rights and those modern “conveniences” to which they have become accustomed. Will generational change confirm and extend the environmental “reforms” of the recent past and present? Nature may in a backhanded way confirm the future, as people begin to feel the effects of unrestrained


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growth of population and the economy, of dysfunctional civil conflict, of toxic pollution of the environment, of displacement of the quantity and quality of living species on the earth, and of the adverse effects of global climate change. But then again, there is also a real possibility that it may not. In evolution, behavioral change has often occurred under the coercion of nature, if sufficiently felt or visible. Formerly change consisted of moving away from disaster to a location of greater safety from inimical forces—human enemies, or in nature such as prevalence of malaria, loss of soil fertility, or exhaustion of available water. However, given the global scale of the environmental problems that face us, migration to other planets is not a present option. Our assumption, then, is that the long-term survival of humankind requires realistic assumptions of the direction of humanity on the planetary trajectory of history and adequate social and political goals to manage our collective behavior. It offers no opinion whether changed assumptions regarding human relationships within nature will increase or diminish shortrun happiness or apprehension. It does, however, advance the argument that realistic assumptions regarding humankind’s relationships to the Earth and at broader levels of complexity (i.e., the cosmos) may change behavioral feedback affecting its social and natural environments and may lead to a preferable and sustainable future. At a minimum, such a process of learning at the social level should modify our behavior as a non-responsible occupant of the planet and curb those egoisms expressed in human hubris. With few exceptions, however, modern humanity appears “locked in” to a Faustian quest to resolve a paradoxical separateness and oneness of the human organism with all life. But unfortunately, these prescientific efforts, like those of many today, could not “prove this assertion without proving the existence of God.”4 However, since the development of these assumptions, there have been numerous advances in science that disprove the separateness of nature and that have expanded the “location” of humanity in a much larger context of complexity, space, and ultimately relationships among them. Yet our minds and institutions invariably resist aligning our thoughts and behaviors with a newly rediscovered systemic paradigm from which all other human conceptual creation emanates. Inertia in our minds and political institutions is common and change is often resisted until it is too late (Maxwell, 1991; Vaihinger, 1935). But relationships that might lead to reasonable assumptions may nevertheless be difficult to substantiate (e.g., “right” or “wrong”). A case in point is a controversy in the academic field of geography regarding the effect of the natural environment on the level of human civilization. In 1915,

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Ellsworth Huntington, a Research Associate (subsequently professor) at Yale University, published a hypothesis that climate limited the rise of and the development of civilization (Huntington, 1948).5 Huntington’s theories became controversial among some conservative geographers. His theoretical proposition was often described as an “ism” (i.e., environmental determinism). Erupting shortly before the advent of the environmental movement, this controversy hindered the discipline of geography in facilitating movement away from the SSSM and toward the new conceptual synthesis. Nevertheless Huntington became a leading and an honored scholar in his profession. In 1942 the distinguished Service to Geography Award was conferred upon him by the National Council of Teachers of Geography. Environment of the Human Adventure The story of humanity from the Ice Age to the Space Age could be told in human efforts to push the potential of their environment as far as they could. From the urge to learn what lies beyond those distant hills to the exploration of other planets, the human urge to discover, enrich, and convert, paradoxically appears to be ingrained, and at least partially responsible for, the evolutionary success of our species. However, given the most reliable scientific evidence that we have, it appears that the future evolutionary success of human society requires a shift to new modes of assumption and behavior. Humanity has now reached a point in time where fundamental choices that all societies make regarding their scientific models, social and political structures, life functions, and lifesupport systems may make the difference between their survival within, not separate from, a dramatically altered environment. Although to some extent societies are always at a point when the choices they make shape their futures, the present period is critical for humanity’s future (Caldwell, 1999). Developments and events in human society are converging in numbers, scope, and impact that have no historical precedent.6 Such expectations have been projected largely upon evidence of crises in the external environment. Convergent crises of overpopulation, undernourishment, contamination of soil, air, and water, depletion of minerals, fuels, and wildlife head a much longer list culminating in global climate change. However, the most threatening development remains largely unperceived— a crisis of man’s internal environment (Bazerman, Moore, and Gillespie, 1998; but cf. Moos, 1976; Coward, 1995). Throughout the centuries and in diverse cultures, the treatment of the human environment—natural and man-made—reflects human assumptions


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regarding its nature and relationships to nature. Yet the most important understanding in the above retrospective is that the elements that make human behavior and institutions unsustainable are fundamentally psychocultural, not material or natural. We are therefore confronted by these hazards in the environment with an unavoidable choice, which may eventually become necessity. Whatever the society does or fails to do, inevitably affects its course into the future wherein the possibilities of evolution in reaction to changed external circumstances or possibly even self-destruction are infinitely greater than at any prior point in acknowledged history. It is this assessment of a predicament that suggests the need to change our relationships with the environment through an inevitable process of social learning, which requires time and public leadership (Bandura, 1977; Michael, 1973; Milbrath, 1989). However, if we are to also acknowledge the utilitarian nature of our actions, we may see that a behavioral disorder on a scale of the present destruction of the environment must have had some utilitarian function in the past, but is no longer relevant to modern day circumstances. The evolutionary problem, then, is to treat the present mental state of man and the resulting environmental destructiveness as an evolutionary disorder, which has particular relevance to our present environmental dilemma and necessitates discovering the bio-behavioral linkages between a disorder of the mind and the apparently self-destructive behavior it creates.7 Conclusion Through the combined efforts of the sciences, we are now approaching a time when it may be possible to understand human behavior with relation to its environment to a degree wholly without precedent. Yet as with any human endeavor, there is both a potential of enormous good and many dangers from the information that may be gained by our knowledge (e.g., see Perrow, 1984). The good would lie in the possibility of better understanding the complex and systemic interactions between the brain and the environment whose behavioral consequences we call insanity, suicide, senility, mental retardation, of violence and war, and also of accelerating ecocide. There is risk, however, in attempting to implement new knowledge that may often be inconsistent with traditional assumptions and existing behaviors and institutions, possibly resulting in political, social, or religious conflict. And in no society has the advancement of knowledge been an unqualified good for everyone. The reverberations of the displacement of antique cosmologies shook social institutions by the Copernican view of the Earth in the Solar

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System. Darwinian evolution provoked bitter debate, prohibitory legislation, and still remains a point of political controversy. However, as advances in the sciences continue to expose prescience assumptions about the nature of the world and man, it becomes even more difficult to base political truth on biological falsehood. Some political ideas and dogmas may find it impossible to accommodate to the new reality. At a minimum, it seems highly probable that a profound restatement of the nature of human behavior will find some form of political expression. Implausible as it may seem at present, Nisbet’s assessment of the environmental movement mentioned in the beginning of this short chapter, may yet be realistic. There is a distinct possibility that the evolution of environmental thought and the development of science could merge into a broad-based bio-political movement, whose good is the restructuring of social and political institutions to insure equitable benefits, to prevent further destruction of the environment, and to control new knowledge. At a minimum, however, the environmental issues and problems now facing humanity on a global scale are reviving one of the oldest and fundamental tenets of democratic governance: that the role of government is to provide for the future security and survival of the greatest good. To accomplish this aim will, of course, require social learning—about which we have much to learn. But there also appears that we have some unlearning to do if we are to modify human assumptions and behaviors and set the world on a course toward environmental sustainability. Perhaps a lesson could be drawn from Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation of circumstances that led to the French Revolution. He stated, “Nothing is better fitted to give a lesson in modesty to philosophers and statesmen than the history of the French Revolution; for never were there events more important, longer in ripening, more fully prepared, or less foreseen” (Tocqueville, 1856: 26). This is the practical, pragmatic approach of prudent and farsighted governors. But changes of public perception and attitudes will most certainly lead to the formulation of new values. With little doubt, advances in astronomy and astrophysics have brought humanity to see the cosmos as the ultimate part of the human environment, of which humanity is not separate. And so this chapter is appropriately concluded with lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who saw that the ultimate aim of science was to find a true theory of nature, which must also be a theory of creation. Emerson stated (1933: 122): If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!


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Notes 1. The Warning identified crucial environmental stress on atmosphere, water resources, oceans, soils, forests, and living species exacerbated by unrestrained population growth. Note also Joseph Coates (1991), “The sixteen sources of environmental pollution in the 21st century,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 40: 87–91. 2. Simon has been possibly the most notorious “debunker” of limits to growth, resource depletion, and over-population. 3. Among participants of Humanity 3000, an August 2000 conference sponsored by the Foundation for the Future held in Seattle, Washington, a plurality agreed that the development of a universal consciousness is probable. See Humanity 3000 (2001), Vol. 1, Bellevue, WA: Foundation For the Future; or Niebhur, Gustav (1999), “Alternative religions as a growth industry: How the Internet and airplanes help spread faith,” The New York Times December 25: C1, C3. 4. This is a quote from Rene Descartes in a Letter to Pere Mersenne (December 31, 1640), Vol. 2, 303, in Euveres de Descartes, C. Adam and P. Tannery (Eds.), 12 vols, Paris: Cerf, 1896–1913. 5. For a review of Huntington’s work see John E. Chappell, Huntington and His Critics: The Influence of Climate on Carburization. 6. See, e.g., the introduction to the American Association For The Advancement of Science, Atlas of Population and Resources, Berkley: University of California Press, 2002. 7. A step toward assessing the prospect for human choice toward a sustainable future might be a multidisciplinary updating of the substance of a book by anthropologist George A. Dorsey (1925), Why We Behave Like Human Beings, New York: Harper & Brothers.

References Andrews, Richard N. L. (1999). Managing Environment, Managing Ourselves: A History of American Environmental Policy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bandura, Albert. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. Bazerman, Max H., Don A. Moore, and James Gillespie. (1998). The Human Mind as a Barrier to Wiser Environmental Agreements. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research, Working Papers-98-16. Bernard, Claude. (1957). Research in Experimental Medicine. An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. Translated from French by Henry Copley Green. New York: Dover Publications. Boulding, Boulding. (1985). The World as a Total System. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage. Caldwell, Lynton K. (1963). Environment: A new focus for public policy? Public Administration Review 23: 132–139. Caldwell, Lynton K. (1999). Is humanity destined to self-destruct? Politics and Life Sciences 18: 3–14.

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Coward, Harold (Ed.). (1995). Population, Consumption, and the Environment; Religious and Secular Responses. Albany: State University of New York Press. Eisely, Loren. (1962). Francis Bacon and the Modern Dilemma. Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. (1933). Nature. In Tremaine McDowell (Ed.), The Romantic Triumph: American Literature from 1830 to 1860. New York: Macmillan. Fagan, Brian. (1999). Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations. New York: Basic Books. Farrington, Benjamin. (1949). Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science. New York: Henry Schuman. Forrester, Jay W. (1947). World Dynamics. Cambridge, Mass.: Wright. Forrester, Jay W. (1971). Counterintuitive behavior of social systems. Technology Review 73 (January): 53. Fowles, John. (1979). Seeing nature whole. Harpers 259 (November): 49–68. Huntington, Ellsworth. (1948). Civilization and Climate. 3rd edition. New Haven: Yale University Press. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (2001). Summary for Policymakers. Geneva: IPCC. King, Alexander and Bertrand Schneider. (1991). First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome. New York: Pantheon. Laszlo, Ervin. (1972). The System Views of the World. New York: Braziller. Maxwell, Mary. (1991). Moral Inertia. Niwot, Colo.: University Press of Colorado. Meadows, Donella, Dennis L. Meadows et al. (1972). The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books. Michael, Donald N. (1973). On Learning to Plan—and Planning to Learn. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Milbrath, Lester W. (1989). Envisioning a Sustainable Society: Learning Our Way Out. Albany: State University of New York Press. Moos, Rudolf H. (1976). The Human Context: Environmental Determinants of Behavior. New York: John Wiley. Nisbet, Robert. (1982). Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Oxford. (1986). Oxford Reference Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press. Perrow, Charles. (1984). Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies. New York: Basic Books. Simon, Julian L. (1980). Resources, population, environment: An oversupply of false bad news. Science 108: 1431–1436. Tocqueville, Alexis de. (1856). On the State of Society of France Before the Revolution in 1789; and on the Causes which led to that Event. Translated by Henry Reeve. London: John Murray. Union of Concerned Scientists. (1992). World Scientist’s Warning to Humanity. Cambridge, Mass.: Union of Concerned Scientists. Vaihinger, Hans. (1935). The Philosophy of “As if.” London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co.

CHAPTER 5

Neuroscience, Free Will, and Individual Responsibility: Implications for Addictive Behavior Robert H. Blank

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his chapter demonstrates how cognitive neuroscience clearly challenges the traditional Standard Social Science Model (SSSM). Despite the rapid expansion of the understanding of brain structure and function in recent years, we still are in our infancy in terms of developing a unifying theory of how it operates. As a result, considerable controversy surrounds neuroscience in at least four broad areas: the mind/brain distinction; the organization of the brain; the impact of genetics on the brain; and the role of the brain in determining human behavior. After briefly discussing the first three of these concerns, the chapter focuses on the implications of the findings of neuroscience on our understanding of the role of the brain in human behavior particularly as it relates to addictive behavior, free will, and individual responsibility. Current arguments over how the brain operates and relates to the mind extend back to the foundations of Western philosophy. Aristotle’s rejection of Plato’s view that a rational soul had its seat in the brain in favor of a heart-asmind, cardiocentric theory where the brain is a mere cooling system for the body, was later replaced as the theory of choice by Descartes’ dualistic theory of a separate brain and mind. Despite a growing agreement today that the mind is a construct that has outlived its usefulness and that the mind is what the brain does, dualistic theory still has supporters who believe we cannot reduce thought and consciousness to biochemical interactions at the synapses.

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Another assumption of many philosophers was that at birth the brain is a blank slate or tabula rasa. This assumption gave society broad sway in teaching the citizen and shaping reality and is central to the SSSM. Individuals could be molded by social engineering. A related long-standing controversy over the nature of the brain pits the holistic theories against those that emphasize localization and specialization of function. Under holistic doctrine, the brain functions as an indivisible whole not reducible to its component parts. The holistic theory was dominant until the mid-nineteenth century. However, Paul Broca’s celebrated finding that loss of speech (aphasia) was associated with lesions in the left frontal lobe revealed an asymmetry between the two hemispheres thus contradicting holistic doctrine. By demonstrating that language was not a single function, the rush for empirical research was underway. The current representation of a modular brain combines elements of earlier localization and holistic conceptions of the brain. The Modular Brain According to holistic theories postulated by Descartes and many others, there is at some level a master site within the brain where all the separate components converge. This notion of a master control site, although intuitively attractive because it represents the “I” as a single entity, is not supported by our knowledge of how the brain operates. The brain does not, and in fact is incapable of, acting as a single integrated whole. Instead, very specific functions of the brain are highly localized, and these localized units (often termed modules) are linked together in a complex structure. For example, the neurons that allow our vision to differentiate straight lines differ from those that delineate curves. The modular brain theory, however, transcends simple localization of function. What is most remarkable is that despite the division of labor, the brain has evolved structures that link these components together in predictable ways. Although specific functions are localized, all neurons and nuclei communicate with other modules. Multiple connections all operate simultaneously in parallel. This means that there is no cortical terminus, no master site or seat of consciousness. No one area holds sway over all others. All the separate modules do not report to a single executive center. For instance, while there is no one emotion center, the genesis and expression of emotions takes place in a constellation of groups of neurons, or modules, or what Changeux terms “integration foci” (1997: 21).

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The parallel processing capacity of the brain most likely has evolved as a survival mechanism given the constraints of the brain structure. By computer standards neurons act very slowly. Electrophysiological impulses in the brain travel at about 100 meters per second, about one millionth the speed that electrical impulses travel computer circuits. The brain is able to compensate for this relative slowness by using very many neurons simultaneously and in parallel and by arranging the system in a rough hierarchical manner (Crick and Koch, 1992: 155). Any activity involves a wide network involving many mutually interactive processes occurring simultaneously in many parts of the brain. There are several areas where strong evidence supporting the modular theory has been uncovered. One of the most studied is language where it has been found that the brain processes language by means of three interacting sets of structures. First, a large collection of nuclei in both the right and left cerebral hemispheres represent conceptual, symbolic interactions with the environment, mediated by sensory and motor systems. These functions categorize and organize objects, events, and relationships. Second, a smaller number of nuclei generally located in the left hemisphere represent individual sound units and syntactic rules for combining words. Finally, a third set of neural systems mediates between the first two. This set can “take a concept and stimulate the production of word-forms, or it can receive words and cause the brain to evoke the corresponding concepts” (Damasio and Damasio, 1992: 89). Moreover, spoken and written comprehension take place in separate areas of the brain, with knowledge organized to include all modules operating simultaneously. It makes sense that when groups of neurons must interact to carry out a specific function, they be localized in one region of the brain. Neurons in close proximity tend to receive similar input. Moreover, because of this proximity and the relatively short connections to nearby neurons, they allow for rapid interaction. The fact that performance of simple functions is localized does not, however, negate the possibility that overall strategies for performing an integrative operation can be effectuated by combining different simple functions. Kosslyn and Koenig distinguish an integrative function (e.g., language) from the simpler component functions in arguing that we can have it both ways. Some functions are localized, but the brain also works as a whole to produced integrated functions that are not localized. The tasks of research, then, are to characterize what the functions are, which parts of the brain carry each one out, and how the functions work together (Kosslyn and Koenig, 1992: 12).

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Early localization notions distinguished among the midbrain role in autonomic responses, the frontal cortex system role in emotions and behavior, and the neo-cortex role in complex information processing, verbal language, and complex memory. Recent research shows this typology to be much too simple with substantially more specialization throughout the neural system. Under the modular brain theory, the brain is a complex system of linked structures. Localized assemblages of neurons have to communicate with each other or the entire system breaks down. In so doing they actually change their structure and their interrelations (Masters, 1994: 7). The brain under this theory is an active, changing organ that requires constant intercommunication among distant neurons and nuclei in order to integrate activity of these specialized modules.

Memory and Reason Memory is central to human existence. At a most fundamental level our personal sense of identity is found in our memory: our capacity to remember past experiences and build upon them. Memory is central to learning and to our ability to function at the most basic human levels. It is not surprising, therefore, that memory has been a focus of neuroscience research, much funded to study the mechanisms of memory loss from dementia, which deprives the victims of personal identity (Gazzaniga, 2000; Bellugi, 2001). These studies of memory strongly reflect the modular theory of the brain. There is conclusive evidence that memory is not a single entity, but rather a process comprising many essential components. Memory cannot be found in any single structure or location in the brain, though its components have been localized with increasing preciseness. “Thus, there are no pictures stored in the brain, as was once thought. There are patterns of connections, as changeable as they are numerous, that, when triggered, can reassemble the molecular parts that make up a memory. Each brain cell has the capacity to store fragments of many memories, ready to be called up when a particular network of connections is activated” (Kotulak, 1996: 20). There are many different dimensions and channels of memory storage that have been isolated. First, there are two separate channels of memory storage centered in different parts of the brain. Specific recall is centered in the temporal lobe and its connections to the limbic system. In contrast, habit formation, through which we remember how to perform skills is a more diffuse system located primarily in the striatum. There is also evidence that the hippocampal system is involved in episodic memory, that over time (weeks or months) it transfers to the neo-cortex (Kandel and Hawkins, 1992).


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In addition, there is a complementary relationship between two types of memory. Associative memory acquires facts and figures and holds them in long-term storage. However, such knowledge is of no value unless it can be brought to the forefront by working memory, itself a combination of different types of short-term memory. Working memory allows for short-term activation and storage of symbolic information and permits manipulation of that information (Goldman-Rakic, 1992: 11). Working memory is the basic element in language, learning, thinking, and behavior. There is evidence that it is carried out in the prefrontal lobes, which also perform executive functions such as problem solving, planning, and organizing, which require working memory. Also identified are separate neuronal circuits for spatial, object, and verbal working memories, although it remains debatable if there is one region that acts as a central processor for all working-memory information. GoldmanRakic (1992) believes there is not one such center but instead parallel systems each with its own central processor. Recent studies using a wide variety of sophisticated scanning devices that permit noninvasive imaging of brain activities and functions, such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET), have found that working memories for facial features and locations reside in separate regions of the prefrontal cortex and in separate sensory areas. It is expected that as research on memory expands, we will find even more divisions of labor by specific modules of neurons. Closely related to memory is the function of reason or thought. Kosslyn and Koenig (1992) see reason as the best example of an integrative function. Like memory, reason requires the orchestration of many component processes. In addition to memory subsystems, reasoning incorporates a host of processing subsystems including perceptual encoding, imagery subsystems, action subsystems, and perceptual input subsystems. Also, like memory the reasoning process assumes the presence of a decision system that coordinates all the others so that a specific goal can be met.

Consciousness Although long supported on religious and scientific grounds, dualist theories have been challenged by many variations of deterministic or reductionist models in which consciousness becomes reduced to the product of environmental, genetic, or physiochemical factors. Behavioral psychologists such as B. F. Skinner believe that environmental factors determine human thought and action. Under these theories, the brain becomes in effect a passive conveyer of information, that is, an empty organism. In contrast the genetic

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model assumes that behavior can be explained in the absence of conscious acts by either genes attempting to survive or altruistic organisms operating instinctively by kin selection. E. O. Wilson, for example, concludes: “The brain exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication of genes that direct its assembly. The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction and reason is just one of its techniques” (1978: 2). Although neuroscience research might ultimately validate or undermine the environmental and genetic models, its most direct relevance is to the physiochemical model. Although Crick admits that the “brain is clearly so complex that the chances of being able to predict its behavior solely from the study of its parts is too remote to consider” (1979: 222), elsewhere he concludes that the “ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry” (1966: 10). Other observers contend that at their base mental processes are physical events. Churchland argues that mental phenomena might be reducible to neurobiological phenomena (1988: 273). For Changeux, the combinational possibilities provided by the number and diversity of neural connections in the brain are more than sufficient to account for human mental capabilities, thus, “There is no justification for a split between mental and neuronal activity. . . . It seems quite legitimate to consider that mental states and physiological or psychological states of the brain are identical”(1997: 275). Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of the mind is consciousness or selfawareness, which can take many forms from experiencing pain to planning for the future. Often the mind has been equated with consciousness, that which makes a human a human. Consciousness provides us with the continuity of our selfhood across our life. We are not only conscious of things but also conscious about our feelings about them. We can even be conscious of our own feeling of being conscious about something (regress). Harth terms consciousness the “most challenging phenomenon exhibited by the brain” (1993: 133). But what is consciousness, a state of the mind or the activity of neurons? Neuroscience research undermines traditional ideas about the unity or indissolubility of our mental life. Consciousness makes it appear that a single individual is the recipient of all sensations, perceptions, feelings, and the originator of all thoughts, but according to Dennett (1984) and others this apparent unity of the “I” and its self-awareness is largely an illusion. For Harth, “there is in the brain no single stage on which the multiple events picked up by our senses are displayed together” (1993: 133). Rather, consciousness is a process, a kind of global regulatory system dealing with mental objects and computations using those objects.


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Most operations of the brain take place outside our conscious awareness. They, instead, are carried out by a combination of genetic instructions and learned reactions to sensory inputs. We remain unconscious of most of our brain’s activity. In fact full awareness would be an impediment to our functioning. Restak (1994: 129) notes that while the unconscious brain comes closest to a materialist’s image of an intricate, thoroughly deterministic machine, the conscious brain is very different. At the highest levels of consciousness we experience a self-conscious controller who wills, remembers, decides, and feels emotion. Although there appears to be little argument with the assumption that consciousness requires brain activity, there remains disagreement as to whether we can ever explain consciousness solely by the workings of the brain. According to Scott, consciousness is a real, “awesomely complex phenomenon” that cannot be reduced to some fundamental theory or a simple biological or chemical reaction (1995: 159). Similarly, while Churchland concludes that the state of consciousness is primarily a biological phenomenon, the contents of consciousness are “profoundly influenced” by the social environment (1995: 269). Churchland’s distinction between a state and content appears to be supported by neurological evidence. It has been discovered that while the content of consciousness, as with memory, is found in the cerebral cortex, the maintenance and regulation of a conscious state is centered in the reticular formation region of the midbrain, which serves as an activation system for wakefulness. Because consciousness cannot occur without wakefulness, it is dependent on the activity of one of the most primal parts of the brain. However, since consciousness also requires content and a relationship to that content, it is always the product of interrelated activity of the neo-cortex and the reticular activating system, thus again manifesting the modular brain in action (Restak, 1994: 126). Changeux offers a theory of consciousness based on what he terms “mental objects,” which allow us to be conscious of an “unending dialogue” with both the external world and the inner world of the self. The brain contains representations of the outside world in the neo-cortex and is capable of building representations of its own and using them in its computations. Because mental objects imply a much higher level of organization than that of a nerve cell, “the mental object is identified as the physical state created by correlated, transient activity, both electrical and chemical, in a large population or ‘assembly’ of neurons in several specific cortical areas” (Changeux, 1997: 137). This work in visual awareness, if extended to consciousness in general, reinforces the view that consciousness is a unique property of the brain that

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is effectuated by a large number of interacting neural assemblies operating in parallel. Consciousness is inextricably tied to memory, reliant on attention activating functions, and interconnected with sensory regions of the brain. Although we cannot substitute a description of physical brain events for consciousness, it does arise only through the joint activity of billions of neurons organized in assemblies or mental objects. For Restak, this evidence demonstrates that “consciousness, thought, memory, will, emotion—none of these has any independent outside reality other than in the context of the human brain. All are based on the brain’s organization” (1994: 13). Before the death knell is sounded for dualism, however, it is important to note that there has not been a decisive resolution of the mind/brain question. Even if the mind is the expression of the activity of the brain and the two are in actuality inseparable, this does not mean that it is useless to separate them for analytical purposes. Scott concludes that it is not necessary to choose between materialism and dualism. Both can be accepted with certain reservations. For Scott, we must construct consciousness from “the relevant physics and biochemistry and electrophysiology and neuronal assemblies and cultural configurations and mental states that science cannot yet explain” (1995: 159–160). Similarly, Miller concludes: “Consciousness may be implemented by neurobiological processes—how else?—but the language of neurobiology does not and cannot convey what it’s like to be conscious” (1992: 180). Policy Implications of Our New Understanding of the Brain What difference does it make as to whether the holistic, localized, or modular theory of the brain is most accurate. From a policy standpoint, as opposed to a philosophical one, does it matter whether the brain and mind are indistinguishable or separate? And, what implications does it have for the success or failure of traditional SSSM policy making? Although on the one hand it would seem that none of this should matter, the resilience of the controversies over these topics demonstrates that they have significant policy ramifications. First, throughout Western history research on the brain has confronted opposition from both the left and right ends of the ideological spectrum. On the right, this research threatens the concept of the immaterial soul that is at the foundation of much religious doctrine. Even in a nonreligious context, the realization that the “I” is simply a product of a vast network of nerve cell connections challenges strongly held beliefs in individual responsibility, autonomy, and free will. It threatens to take some of the mystery out of human life.


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From the opposite ideological direction, the findings of brain research have always raised fears of the social impact of new discoveries: of social and behavioral control. The demise of the tabula rasa notion of the brain also has implications for education, social, and legal policies that dismiss biological variables. Critics see threats of a psycho-chemical determinism that they wrongly equate with past theories of genetic determinism. Brain research has also elicited opposition from liberals who fear that its findings will be used as weapons of oppression or that it will undermine the environmental paradigm. Ultimately, the controversy over behavioral genetics will focus on the brain, because it is through the neural system that genetic influences are manifested (Andreasen, 2001). Furthermore, the more we understand the functioning of the brain, the more we are led to the conclusion that we are limited by what our individual brains permit. This is not to be interpreted as suggesting that brains determine behavior, but rather that they mediate genetic and environmental influences. In the words of Roger Masters: “The neurochemistry of behavior is not the same theory as genetic determinism. On the contrary, neurotransmitters like serotonin vary from one individual to another for many reasons, including the individual’s life experience, social status, and diet. Genes may influence neurochemistry. So do behavior, culture, and the social environment” (1994: xiv). Ultimately, however, the brain affects or mediates every action and thought of both political leaders and citizens. Our capacity for enjoyment, suffering, and behavior is inscribed in neurons and synapses. As a result our interpretation of the world, including the political and social dimensions, and our responses to it depend on the internal organization of the brain. Therefore, in order to make sense of human behavior we must understand the organization and functioning of the system that controls or modulates it, the central nervous system. The findings of cognitive neuroscience, then, mandate a model that acknowledges that the brain has a major role in explaining behavior. As noted by Changeux: “The development of the neurosciences has brought another way of looking at behavior. . . . The neuronal content of the black box can no longer be ignored. On the contrary, all forms of behavior mobilize distinct sets of nerve cells, and is at their level that the final explanation of behavior must be sought” (1997: 97). Although it is debatable whether we will ever be able to describe a particular behavior in terms of specific neuronal activity, it is crucial that this neural dimension be an integral part of any respectable paradigm of behavior. To ignore the role of the brain is no longer possible in light of what we now know even in the rather primitive stages of neuroscience (see e.g., Teicher, 2002).

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Current social science theory will have to be qualified by neuroscience findings. Although uncomfortable to many social scientists, new knowledge of the brain must be incorporated if they are to retain credibility as science. “Even now the new developments in the biochemistry of the brain and in psychopharmacology demand attention by social scientists, if only at the public policy level” ( White, 1992: 16). Although inclusion of the biological sciences in the social sciences is by no way an original theme (see Wiegele, 1979; Degler, 1991; Blank and Hines, 2001), dramatic advances in the cognitive neuroscience over the past decade make it more imperative. The Brain and Addictive Behavior Addiction is a major social and health problem in U.S. society that increasingly has been linked to the brain. The financial cost of alcohol abuse alone is estimated to be over $90 billion annually with other substance abuse adding $70 billion. Over 30 million Americans alive today will experience addiction to alcohol or illegal substances in their lifetimes. Moreover, 40 percent of American families are affected by addiction. One could certainly argue that the $92 billion spent on alcohol, $44 billion on tobacco, and $40 billion spent on major drugs of abuse in 1990 could be better spent. Although the social and cultural dimensions of addiction are complex, attention here is focused on the relationship of addiction to the brain. Two issues of addiction relevant here are: (1) the biochemical/genetic bases of addiction, and (2) impact of addictive substances on the brain and its normal functioning. Findings from neuroscience research in the past several decades have illuminated addictive behavior by explicating the role of genetic and environmental factors and their interaction with the biochemistry of the brain. Through expanded knowledge of the roles of specific neurotransmitters and the ability to visualize the brains of addicts through PET imaging, the neural bases of addiction are becoming clear. As our understanding increases, it is obvious that addiction extends far beyond the physical need for chemicals to a wide range of activities that produce feelings of dependency in our neural networks (see Elster, 1999). While addiction can affect all organs of the body, the primary target is the brain. Addictive substances or behaviors are linked to the brain’s capacities to experience feelings of pleasure and pain that have evolved to manage fundamental behaviors such as feeding, reproduction, and aggression. When the brain’s pleasure centers are stimulated, it sends out signals to repeat the pleasure-producing activity. According to DuPont, because automatic brain mechanisms do not account for delayed gratification, the brain is selfish,


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characterized by a right now quest for pleasure (1995: 5). Therefore, when the brain comes into contact with an addicting substance and when this substance triggers the pleasure centers, there is a strong incentive to repeat the exposure. To complicate matters further, there is strong evidence of genetic predispositions to addictive behavior and possibly to addiction from particular substances such as alcohol. Moreover, people who are genetically oriented toward immediate gratification or impulsive behavior and risk taking are also at higher risk for addiction. Despite the importance of genetic, cultural, and social factors in explaining addiction, at the base our understanding must focus on the brain (Leshner, 1997). Not only is the brain the key to unlocking the causes of addiction, but it must also be the focus of study to determine how addictive drugs and behaviors affect brain functioning, cause distortions in thinking, and physically change the brain of the addicted person. Although a wide range of behaviors is potentially addictive (e.g., sex, gambling, eating, running, and surfing the Net), most attention has been focused on drugs because in chemicals the effects are most apparent. All drugs of abuse produce their effects by traveling through the bloodstream to the brain. Once in the brain, each drug alters the function of specific brain cells. Stimulants such as cocaine act as an exciting influence on certain nuclei, while depressants such as alcohol and the narcotics act to inhibit their activity. Some drugs act by blocking the re-uptake of neurotransmitters from the synapse to the sending axon, thus facilitating transmissions by prolonging the time the neurotransmitter remains in the synapse. Other drugs actually mimic particular neurotransmitters by sending their own messages and occupying the receptors. Moreover, some substances like alcohol interfere with the cell membrane, while others affect the synapse working either as agonists (activating transmission across the synapse) or antagonists (blocking the receptor sites on the dendrites). Whatever the precise mechanism of a specific substance, tolerance builds because when a particular neurotransmitter is excessively stimulated over a long period, the brain reestablishes equilibrium by reducing the sensitivity of the affected receptors or by decreasing their number. This process, termed downregulation, means that the more the brain is exposed to chemicals affecting a neurotransmitter, the less the brain responds to a specific dose. Therefore, in order to experience the same effect, the addict must use higher doses. A related effect, physical dependence, is manifested by withdrawal symptoms experienced when use of the substance is stopped. Such symptoms vary by substance and reflect the cellular adaptation of the neurons of that area of the brain to the continued presence of the substance that has influenced its functioning.

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Withdrawal symptoms manifest the shock to the brain by a rapid alteration of the chemical environment and are interpreted by the addict as a “need” to resume use of the substance. A key to understanding the biochemical bases of addiction, then, is at the molecular and cellular levels in the mechanisms of neurotransmitters (Nestler and Aghajanian, 1997). Two prominent theories of addiction focus on the endorphins and dopamine. According to the latter theory, most of the drugs of abuse including alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, and the narcotics stimulate the dopamine-producing neurons in the median forebrain bundle, the neural pathway that connects the midbrain to the forebrain (Wise, 1988). This increased production of dopamine creates the euphoria and pleasure associated with the high, thus reinforcing its continued use. Research has demonstrated that if dopamine production is turned off by dopaminesuppressing chemicals, the stimulating effects of the drug are blocked. The second theory applied specifically to opiate addiction focuses on a group of peptides, the endorphins of which over a dozen natural forms are known. The endorphin brain system moderates pain, promotes pleasures, and manages stress. Endorphins also act as neurohormones and can affect nerve functioning at distant sites in the nervous system through the blood. Endorphine receptors are found in other parts of the body including the intestines, which might explain why these drugs often affect other organs as well. It has been postulated that endorphins can explain the physiological dependence of heroin, because when external opiates are taken, the brain ceases to produce endorphins. As a result, the person becomes totally dependent on the drug for relief of pain or feeling of pleasure since natural production by the brain of these needed chemicals has ceased. Termination of the drug use results in withdrawal symptoms until resumption of endorphin production by the brain (Bootzin et al., 1993: 324). Furthermore, research indicates that opiate receptor sites can be occupied by antagonists, such as naloxene and naltrexone that are used to treat overdose and addiction. Even if the opiates get to the receptor sites first, the antagonists cover the sites thereby blocking the drug’s capacity to produce a rush. Not surprisingly, the affect of a particular substance as well as its addictive properties depends on many factors including chemical composition and purity; dosage, timing, and frequency of exposure; and the route of administration. Because the most rewarding drug experience is achieved when the brain is hit by a high and rapidly rising level, injection directly into the vein is the most effective delivery route for most substances. Smoking is more addictive than snorting or taking the same drug orally.


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Returning to the two questions that framed this section, what scientific evidence is there that the root of human addictive behavior lies in the brain and what are the dysfunctional effects of addictive substances on the brain? Although the brain’s role in addiction has long been a matter of speculation, research on the neural bases of addiction began with experiments on animals in the 1950s, which utilized electrodes implanted in the pleasure and pain centers of the brain. More recently, knowledge of neurotransmitters and improved instrumentation allows for precise chemical probes of specific brain nuclei. The general finding of an extensive body of research from the 1970s and 1980s is that while the various substances act through an array of distinct mechanisms, ultimately they all work to stimulate pleasure centers and/or suppress pain centers. This commonality in result explains why addicts are willing to use diverse drugs in their search for a high. Specifically, researchers have discovered that several areas of the brain, the ventral tegmental areas and the nucleus accumbens, exhibit high concentrations of dopamine-containing neurons, and that all drugs of abuse trigger the release of relatively large amounts of dopamine into the synapses of these neurons, albeit through varied mechanisms. Critically, this research demonstrates that once exposed to the effects of these substances, these neurons require a repeat exposure to activate release of dopamine and again produce the pleasurable response, resulting in the reward pattern of addiction. As we come to better understand the function of neurotransmitters and receptor sites and the mechanisms by which drugs influence neural activity, we should be able to determine why some people are more susceptible to addiction and offer preventive treatment. Much of what we are learning about addiction and the effect of these substances on the brain comes from research applications of brain imaging techniques. In 1996, neuroscientists for the first time were able to use PET scans of the brains of cocaine addicts in the throes of craving to identify visually the neural bases of addiction. Imaging shows that when addicts feel a craving, there is a high level of activation in the mesolimbic dopamine system. In one study (Goleman, 1996), PET scans were run on patients under treatment for cocaine addiction as they were exposed to cues associated with past craving episodes. The scans indicated activation of the dopamine system in the ventral tegmental area at the moment the addicts expressed intense craving. Another study (Tanda et al., 1997) found that the mesolimbic dopamine system was also active in nicotine addiction, while Rodriguez de Fonesca et al. (1997) found that marijuana affected the same brain circuit. In addition to the ventral tegmental area, these studies uncovered similar activity in the outer layer of the nucleus accumbens and in the interconnected amygdala.

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The latter linkage is supported by evidence that persons with lesions in a section of the amygdala are unable to link pleasure with its causes. Moreover, this research is beginning to provide insights into how the drugs affect the brain. Studies of brain cells demonstrate that repeatedly exposing the brain to addictive drugs represents a chemical assault that alters the very structure of the neurons in the circuitry for pleasure. Over time these changes starve the affected cells of dopamine, thereby triggering a craving for the addictive drugs that will again activate release of high concentrations of that neurotransmitter. During withdrawal, a different brain circuit in the same brain region releases a small protein, corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF). When a person suddenly stops taking the addictive substance, CRF levels rise and the person experiences withdrawal symptoms. Again, this process has been found to be identical for a range of addictive substances including nicotine, marijuana, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines. In light of the technological advances of brain imaging and the current research on the biological bases of addiction to substances, it is likely that such research will be expanded to other addictions such as gambling, aggression, sex, and eating. The implications of this research for dealing with behaviors that are personally and socially destructive are substantial as are the legal and policy ramifications. Through such research we might also come to understand why state-run lotteries are so attractive to lawmakers and how they affect the populations they serve. There is, of course, a danger in extending the notion of addiction to any behavior that becomes patterned because it stimulates the pleasure centers. However, evidence that all substances of abuse have a similar impact on the brain despite differing mechanisms implies extension to non-substance factors that exhibit similar effects on the neural circuitry. This evidence also has implications for drug policy that makes distinctions among potentially addictive substances. Arguments for legalization of marijuana become more difficult to accept given this evidence (Solowij et al., 2002). Moreover, society’s treatment of nicotine and alcohol may have to be modified if consistency is sought. The evidence of the interchangeability of substances in producing similar effects on the activation of dopamine demonstrates that antidrug policies that focus on one drug to the exclusion of others, are unlikely to stem the addiction problem. Rather, such a strategy will simply shift the addiction to other substances when the supply of the first is cut. For the addict it seems no drug is a safe drug, only a substitute. Neuroscience research on addiction, therefore, is likely to undercut some policy initiatives and treatment regimes, but it offers the promise of more creative and effective solutions in the decades to come.


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Neuroscience, Free Will, and Public Policy Free will as a concept has concerned philosophers for centuries and remains a problem to this day. It is not surprising that free will has been of interest for long to political philosophers since it is concept, along with responsibility and freedom, that plays a central role in the way we view ourselves. The belief that we act freely and are morally responsible for our actions is at the base of retributive justice systems and provides a rationale for legal responsibility. Without free will it is meaningless to blame the person for his or her actions, thus free will is necessary to justify punishment, blame, or moral condemnation (Double, 1991: 4). Moreover the personal stance we take toward each other is based on a belief that humans are capable of moral responsibility and deserve moral consideration. The view we take on free will, then, largely shapes ones attitudes toward personal accountability and reward and punishment. Free will is also associated with human dignity. For Kane, free will is held to ground human dignity by allowing agents to be ultimately responsible for their actions. Humans are to be treated as ends in themselves because they are the originators of their own ends or purposes. Free will and rationality are thus intractable. Free will is the power to originate choices, “the power of agents to be the alternate creators (or originators) and sustainers of their own ends and purposes” (Kane, 1996: 3). A belief in free will thus presumes a special status in the world for humans. Intuitively, it is comforting to believe we have free will. We choose to believe that what we will, what we desire, and what we decide, we ultimately determine; that each self is a rational agent, not subject to physical laws, but influenced by reason (Trusted, 1984: 3). Unfortunately, there is no scientific evidence to justify these intuitive convictions. Our concepts of justice, punishment, and deserts are based on our notions of individual responsibility. Likewise, without free will, moral responsibility is vacant since in a deep sense it requires that we are truly deserving of praise or blame because it is we who make the decision as to what we do. If people did not regard themselves and others as responsible beings, life would become cognizably different. “It is a deep and essential feature of life in modern Western society that normal human beings who have reached some level of maturity regard themselves and one another as responsible beings” ( Wolf, 1990: 3). Although we make exceptions for those who lack free will, we take responsible beings more seriously than non-responsible ones. We treat them as persons, not objects; we credit them and hold them to blame, and attribute qualities and events to them more deeply than to others. Responsible

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beings are rational beings with free will. “Rational judgement, like rational action, presupposes freedom. If there is no free will, we are not independent rational beings reaching reasoned conclusions on the basis of evidence and arguments, but mere automata . . .” (Lucas, 1993: 29). Not surprisingly, it seems natural and reasonable to grant oneself and others like us the status of responsibility and free will. We tend to distinguish those aspects of behavior and personality for which we are responsible from those that are not and formulate conditions for responsibility. Agents are deemed responsible if they: (1) have the capacity to reason; (2) are free from constraints such as drugs, hypnosis, or deception; and (3) are in ultimate control of their will. The second condition can be met only for events and properties that stand in relation to the agent such that his/her will is or could have been effective in determining their existence. Moreover, agents under some circumstances cannot be held responsible despite the fact that their wills are effective and relevantly informed (e.g., person under duress or hypnosis). The last condition that agent’s control be ultimate is termed by Kant as autonomy. This condition requires that the agent’s will must be self-determined: it cannot be determined by an external force. It is this assumption that has been the target of the most vehement critics of free will over many centuries. Although instinctively free will reflects our view of oneself and others and is central to our view of the world, this belief has come under attack from many quarters in philosophy. The earliest and most persistent challenges to free will have come from an array of theories that assert that all our intentions and actions are determined or necessitated by factors beyond the control of our will. Determinism is the doctrine that all events including human actions are the consequence of external forces and that as a result we cannot be the originators of our thoughts or actions. Therefore, free will is but an illusion. The earliest external forces were fate or divine intervention, but these were eventually joined by every kind of determinism imaginable. Psychological determinism argues that behavior is determined by prior motives and character, which in turn are the ultimate products of birth and upbringing. For Freud the controls were unconscious. In contrast, logic determinism uses the laws of logic to demonstrate that free will is unintelligible. At present the most widely believed form of determinism is physical in nature. In its generic form this determinism concludes that all events including human behavior are the consequence of prior physical events operating in accordance with established regularity, thus producing a predictable effect. In turn each prior event would be caused by a prior event.


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Although most deterministic theories today focus on genetics and neurotransmitters, determinism need not rest on any particular scientific view of the world, which vary over time. It is possible to argue from the success of science generally and assume that given its success in explaining one phenomenon after another it is only a matter of time before science will be able to explain all human action in terms of environment and heredity. For instance, “Although a one-one correlation between brain states and our mental experience has not been proved, it is widely regarded as plausible” (Lucas, 1993: 21). Kane finds it interesting that deterministic thinking about human behavior has been on the rise in this century at the same time that quantum theory has reintroduced indeterminism in physics (1996: 10). He suggests that developments in the biological, behavioral, and social sciences have convinced many persons that behavior is determined by causes unknown to us and beyond our control. It seems the ideological and scientific have merged to support determinism. Research on the human genome, biochemical influences on the brain, cognitive sciences involving artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis and other theories of unconscious motivation, behavior modification and psychological conditioning, ethology, and upbringing together provide formidable support for external determinants of human behavior. While the rapid advances in neuroscience point to a more complete explanation of human behavior, do they lead to the conclusion that free will is an illusion? Are “free will and moral responsibility, as they are viewed in philosophical discourse and everyday life . . . not to be counted as candidates among the class of real entities” (Double, 1991: 5)? If as Double argues elsewhere, free will is nothing but our “venting of non-truth-related attitudes,” and thus there can be no such thing as free will or as moral responsibility (1996: 3), where does this leave us? While free will has always been problematic and will become more so in light of human genetics and cognitive neuroscience findings, determinism in any final sense will not be forthcoming. The debate over free will cannot end because the idea of free will, though instinctive and subjective, is useful itself in understanding human behavior. As noted earlier, the notion that individuals have the capacity to make choices free of any deterministic force beyond their control is central to rational models of human behavior and a critical tenet of democratic theory as well as the traditional SSSM. It is assumed that citizens have the ability to make decisions free of external and internal constraints and that policy makers exhibit a capacity for rational choice. Justice systems depend on free will in assigning responsibility to individuals for their actions with procedures to make specific exemptions in cases of insanity or diminished capacity.

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Recent evidence of genetic and neuronal contributions to criminal action has been used in many cases as a defense against guilt, based on the lack of free will on the part of the defendant. The “devil made me do it” defense of the past has now become “my genes made me do it,” or “my neurons made me do it.” This argument has also been used to excuse other antisocial behaviors as well as unhealthy lifestyles that cost society billions of dollars a year. Although there appears to be some sympathy for these arguments in American society, to date few juries have bought into this defense most likely because such assumptions challenge conventional assumptions of free will itself. What are we to make of biological findings that demonstrate that human behavior is dependent on gene and neuron-based proclivities? Does this relieve society of responsibility for changing circumstances that would reduce antisocial behavior? Does it mean that attempts by society to resolve individual and group problems are wasted efforts? Are Nelkin and Lindee accurate when they state that “Biological explanations deflect attention away from the social and economic circumstances that may drive people to violence, depression, overeating, or drink, but they also provide an excuse for those who, driven by their predispositions, their irresistible biological drives, need not blame themselves” (1995: 144). Given the intractable interaction between biological and environmental/social factors and the strong evidence as to how the environment influences brain development and function, there is nothing in neurological research that suggests abrogating social responsibility. In fact all evidence suggests the need for early stimulation of the brain in a positive, rewarding environment and for the protection of pregnant women during the critical neural development period for the fetus. What about individual responsibility? Does our new knowledge of genetics and neuroscience mean that individuals no longer can be held responsible for their actions because they lack conscious control? According to Henrik Walter (2001: 419), while this evidence cannot support “certain cherished notions about ourselves,” it does not imply abandonment of all concepts of responsibility. Moreover, if antisocial acts are viewed as the products of disturbances of the brain, as compulsions and not free will, does this not imply that acts of kindness are also predetermined? Are those individuals who love and those who hate merely acting out different brain activity patterns? With some people acts of kindness and consideration toward others are natural and they would find it difficult to act otherwise. Should we also dismiss their actions as the result solely of some neural patterning of their brain? Restak warns that we are now at the stage where “determination of individual responsibility is given over to neurologists and neuropsychologists and


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the concept of free will is relegated to the status of a museum piece dating from medieval scholasticism” (1994: 152). Despite evidence of brain–behavior linkages, however, it should be noted that neural functioning remains a weak predictor of behavior. Alcoholics under twelve-step programs can and often do refrain from drinking. Although they do not attribute this to will, certainly it plays a critical role in some form. Even obvious cases of brain damage to the frontal lobes do not always lead to behavioral abnormalities or deficits. MRIs routinely identify abnormalities that have had no discernible effect on the person’s behavior. Moreover, most individuals with antisocial behavior exhibit normal brain functioning as measured by current technologies. For purposes of discussion, let us assume that a person does manifest severe deficits in neural functioning. Should this mitigate that person’s responsibility for his or her behavior? As noted above, the legal system today makes exceptions based on concepts of diminished capacity. The question of course is where we draw the lines. What is likely to confound the situation is the presence of sophisticated and precise means of mapping the brain and identifying deficits and our expanding knowledge of the role of neurotransmitters in explaining behavioral problems in biochemical terms. A related issue is whether this new understanding of the brain’s functioning undermines the concept of moral responsibility. Again, the issue is not a new one; there has always been disagreement as to whether an addicted person under the influence is legally and or morally responsible for all actions. Similarly, sufferers of schizophrenia or other mental illnesses or neurodegenerating disorders at least are given a sympathetic hearing on the grounds that they were not responsible for their behavior. Our new knowledge simply expands the cases for consideration. The fact that we are now aware that all expressions of what we view as the mind are affected by the biochemical, electrical state of the brain should not force us to abandon the notion of individual responsibility, but it does mean that free will as a concept can no longer be assumed to be its sole foundation. Despite the knowledge of neuroscience, humans do retain the capacity to make conscious decisions—this is what continues to separate us from other mammals. The notion of free will is still functional, although the traditional notion based on tabula rasa has long been outdated. That we are not the fully rational, entirely conscious creatures whose actions are determined solely by logic and reason should come as no surprise. Humans are constrained by brains that have evolved from primitive times where emotions of fear and aggression were crucial to survival.

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Conclusions The rapid advancements in our knowledge of brain structure and functioning and the biochemical bases of human behavior reinforce the need to modify the traditional environmental-based model of the social sciences to include biologically based variables and evolutionary theory. To continue to assume an empty organism flies in the face of mounting evidence in cognitive neuroscience to the contrary. Furthermore, there is clear evidence that public policy founded on the traditional model of assumptions is problematic. The case of addiction policy discussed here is just one area where neuroscience findings challenge conventional policy approaches. Policies regarding antisocial behavior, criminality, ethnic hatred, and differences between the sexes are but a few of the areas where a more inclusive and science-driven perspective is essential. Moreover, fundamental political concepts such as individual responsibility, freedom, justice, and democracy, itself, must be reevaluated in light of this unfolding understanding of our brains and genes.

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Double, Richard. (1991). The Non-Reality of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press. ——. (1996). Metaphilosophy and Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press. DuPont, Robert L. (1995). The Selfish Brain: Learning from Addiction. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press. Elster, Jon. (1999). Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gazzaniga, Michael S. (Ed.). (2000). The New Cognitive Neurosciences. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2nd edition. Goleman, Daniel. (1996). Brain images show science of addiction. Sarasota HeraldTribune August 11: A1. Goldman-Rakic, Patricia S. (1992). Working memory and the mind. Scientific American (September): 111–117. Harth, Erich. (1993). The Creature Loop: How the Brain Makes a Mind. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Kandel, Eric R. and Robert D. Hawkins. (1992). The biological basis of learning and individuality. Scientific American (September): 79–86. Kane, Robert. (1996). The Significance of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press. Kosslyn, Stephen M. and Oliver Koenig. (1992). Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Science. New York: Free Press. Kotulak, Ronald. (1996). Inside the Brain. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel. Leshner, Alan I. (1997). Addiction is a brain disease, and it matters. Science 278: 45–47. Lucas, J. R. (1993). Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Masters, Roger D. (1994). Why study serotonin, social behavior, and the law? In Roger Masters and Michael McGuire (Eds.), The Neurotransmitter Revolution. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Miller, Jonathon. (1992). Trouble in mind. Scientific American (September): 180. Nelkin, Dorothy and M. Susan Lindee. (1995). The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Culture Icon. New York: W. H. Freeman. Nestler, Eric J. and George K. Aghajanian. (1997). Molecular and cellular basis of addiction. Science 278: 58–63. Restak, Richard M. (1994). The Modular Brain. New York: Simon and Schuster. Scott, Alwyn. (1995). Stairway to the Mind: The Controversial New Science of Consciousness. New York: Copernicus. Solowij, Nadia, Robert S. Stephens, Roger A. Raffman et al. (2002). Cognitive functioning of long-term heavy cannabis users seeking treatment. Journal of the American Medical Association 287: 1123–1131. Tanda, G., F. E. Pontieri, and G. DiChiara. (1997). Cannabinoid and heroin activation of mesolimbic dopamine transmission by a common u1 opioid receptor mechanism. Science 276: 2048–2050. Teicher, Martin H. (2002). The neurobiology of child abuse. Scientific American (March): 68–75.

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Trusted, Jennifer. (1984). Free Will and Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walter, Henrik. (2001). Neurophilosophy of Free Will. Cambridge: MIT Press. White, Elliott. (1992). The End of the Empty Organism: Neurobiology and the Sciences of Human Action. Westport, CT: Praeger. Wiegele, Thomas C. (1979). Biopolitics: Search for a More Humane Political Science. Boulder: Westview Press. Wilson, Edward O. (1978). On Human Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wise, R. A. (1988). The neurobiology of craving: Implications for understanding and treatment of addiction. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 97: 118–132. Wolf, Susan. (1990). Freedom within Reason. New York: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 6

The Cultural Evolution of Dying: Euthanasia in the Netherlands Vincent S. E. Falger and Eugene L. F. Falger

Life is hard and then you die. From natural selection, we shouldn’t really expect much else. (Cartwright, 2000: 253) Introduction

F

rom an evolutionary point of view, life has much to do with successful reproduction, but every result of such success sooner or later ends with death. Evolutionary literature, however, is remarkably scarce on death and dying, and in fact George Williams’s theory of senescence, published in 1957, is still the only valid evolutionary answer we have to the question of why we humans and other animals are all set to die within a certain time limit. On the basis of the fact that natural selection forces decrease with increasing age, in particular for women, Williams developed the thesis that the deterioration of all bodily mechanisms as organisms grow older is the consequence of pleiotropy. Pleiotropy is the phenomenon whereby a gene can have two or more different effects. David Buss, whose discussion is condensed here (Buss, 1999: 92–93), takes the gene that influences the production of testosterone in males as an example: on the one hand testosterone is considered to cause relative success in the competition between males for everything, from status to mates. On the other hand, it is known that a higher than average level of

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testosterone may result in a larger risk of prostate cancer in later life. The important effect, however, is the influence on reproductive success. In so far as higher levels of testosterone in males result in a comparative larger reproductive success, the genetic make-up for higher testosterone production is positively selected for. Getting prostate cancer later in life generally does not affect reproductive success, even if it causes death. Ultimately, the pleiotropic process resulted in the evolution of a number of genes that are important in the reproductive stage of life when natural selection is active, but may have detrimental effects in the post-reproductive stages of life. Of course, modern medicine has complicated the model somewhat but has not invalidated it. We still cannot live forever, although the average age we die at has risen considerably. The unavoidability of death and the absence of natural selective forces at the average age of death may lead to the conclusion that there are no directly relevant evolutionary implications for end-of-life policies. This is correct in so far as evolutionary theory is an explanatory device and not a policy instrument, but indirectly an evolutionary perspective can help us to realize what the “rationality” of death in general is, and it may in fact stimulate us to reconsider the taboo with which end-of-life questions in social life are surrounded: death may be unavoidable, but a long death struggle in individual cases certainly is not. Instead of considering life’s end as an obligation to enjoy or endure at all costs and efforts until the bodily mechanism fatally fails, which is mandatory in all major religions,1 it may be the subject of a decision-making process that could result in an earlier end than the “natural” moment. In this chapter we discuss the medical and law practices with regard to active euthanasia and physician assisted suicide of terminally ill patients at their own request in the Netherlands, a modern European country of Christian tradition. The politico-cultural evolution of the mindset of a majority of the Dutch population and the medical profession from taboo via gedogen (“tolerated” unlawful practice) to transparent regulation was advanced by the recognition that euthanasia cannot be prevented in modern medicaltechnological society. Social acceptance of euthanasia, however, is far from automatic; certain strong barriers have to be overcome—in the Netherlands these are of a political and religious character. In this chapter we will concentrate on the modern practice of euthanasia, stressing the relationship between the patient and his or her doctor. To illustrate that dying is a social process, governed by social regulation, we start with describing a few situations of a self-willed end of life in non-Western cultures.

Euthanasia in the Netherlands

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Self-Willed Death of the Elderly and Terminally Ill in Three Non-Western Cultures In many cultures of premodern or non-Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, life ends before death is caused by illness or senescence. Hans Lam reports in his unique book Assisted Death. Termination of Life on Request in Different Societies2 that anthropological literature on termination of life on request is very scarce, which, however, doesn’t mean that there is no extensive reporting on such cases by explorers, traders, and missionaries (see Westermarck, 1913; Wisse, 1993; and Simmons, 1970). Folk literature is another source (e.g., Dorson, 1962). Since this chapter is not aimed at an anthropological discussion of assisted death, we just present three cases from non-Western literature and practice to illustrate that other options than the usual ones in the West are available and socially fully accepted. Lam (1997) opens his book with the old Japanese ballad of Narayama, a story of the preparation for and the successful voyage of O Rin with her son Tappei to the mountain Narayama, where a god dwells. The story is set in a mountain village with food shortages in the district of Nagano where tradition demands that people after their seventieth birthday are carried uphill, preferably by the eldest son, to be left alone there to go to the god of the mountain—a euphemism for dying. O Rin prepares the pilgrimage longingly and extensively, well before her seventieth birthday. She doesn’t use words like death or dying, but instead she talks about a pilgrimage. As much as possible she takes care of the food for her family for the coming winter and she invites all for a farewell diner. Tappei obeys his mother with aversion. In his eyes she still is the indispensable central person in their household whom he cannot and does not want to lose. However, her wish is consistent and clear, and he bows to her wish. In silence Tappei carries his mother up the mountain.3 He leaves her in the falling snow and goes home. He has been— in his own words—the servant of the mountain god. A second example comes from the cattle-keeping Dinka, the largest ethnic group in the Sudan, Africa. Lam (1997: 57–58) quotes a description by anthropologist Lienhardt of a ceremonial burial alive in the first half of the twentieth century. The person buried is the master of the fishing-spear, a political leader with his authority based in his relationship with the divine. The master of the fishing-spear is not supposed to die of natural diseases because that would threaten the physical well-being of his group. When a master of the fishing-spear has fallen sick and is becoming weak, he will call all his people and tell them to bring his whole camp (tribe or

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sub tribe) to his home to bury him while he lives. His people will obey him and come quickly, for if they delay and the master of the fishingspear dies before they reach him, they will be most miserable. They will come and drive their cattle-pegs into the ground by the side of the home of the master of the fishing-spear who is to be buried alive. When they have arrived, the master will talk to his people and tell them what they are to do with him. When his talk with the older people is finished, he will tell them to send the young men for akoc (Cordia rothii) branches, and the young men will be quickly sent to fetch akoc. When they return, they clear a patch of ground so that nothing harmful remains in it; and when they have prepared the ground they dig a grave and put the branches of akoc in it to make a platform. Then they will cut into strips the skin of a bull previously sacrificed, and make it like an angareeb [the bed stead of the Northern Sudan] on the frame they have prepared. And they will take a living ram and tether it at the bottom of the hole (grave) at the side of the platform. They then lift up the master of the fishing-spear, and put him into the earth while he yet lives. And he will not be afraid of death; he will be put in the earth while singing his songs. Nobody among his people will wail or cry because their man has died. They will be joyful because their master of the fishing-spear will give them life (wei) so that they shall live untroubled by any evil. When they have placed the master of the fishing-spear on the platform on the ground, they make another platform above it, also with strips of hide, and put a gourd of milk in the earth with him. Then when all is completed, the young men and old men, girls, women, and children will take cattle dung and fling it upon the grave, until the grave is completely covered with a heap of dung. For the grave of the master of the fishing-spear is not to be covered with earth. And they will sacrifice another bull and a cow-in-calf (Liehardt, quoted in English by Lam, 1997: 57–58). A third example given by Lam is an Inuit case from Greenland, which is given for authenticity’s sake in the original translation from Dutch: A hunter, Mala, was traveling with his wife, two little sons and his old mother Naterk. After two days of traveling, the tempo of which the family adapted to the old Naterk, she said to her son: “I have to say something and there is marrow in my words (. . .) I am old and tired. You must build an igloo for me, because now I have to travel alone.” Mala, her son, protested because he wanted her with him for long, and also his wife Iva could not yet miss her help and good advice; he convinced


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her to stay with them. The next day Mala went ahead, and the rest of the family caught up with her and about noon she was put exhausted on a sledge for the last part of the day’s trip. The following night she had pain, she groaned and strange thoughts haunted through her head. Next day, after one more day of exhausting voyaging, she spoke to Mala again: “my son, you are not allowed to object the words I am going to say. My years are numerous and my legs are tired. Build an igloo for me. Yesterday, when I asked you, you did not want to. Now I am asking once more and for the last time; let it not be that I have to order my son so that happens what has to happen anyway.” Mala did what she asked and built an igloo. That evening she bit the sleeping children in their left shoulder—the bite of an old woman brings luck to children—, she took two worn hides and said: “Now I go.” She crawled to her new igloo and went inside and lied down on the hides. Some time later Mala came, he cut a bloc of snow and closed the entrance of the igloo. Nothing was said. Next morning the family traveled on without Naterk. After some days Mala returned, made a hole in the roof of the igloo to let escape the soul of his mother. Again five days later Mala and his wife went to the snow hut again, opened the side wall of the igloo, carried the dead frozen body out, and moved it to a rock with loose stones in the neighborhood. Here they placed the dead body, took off their contaminated mittens with which they had touched her, hided them under the stones and went back to their sons. Her name wasn’t mentioned any more. As much as possible they wiped out their footmarks to mislead the soul of the dead person, lest the soul could not follow them. (Freuchen, 1967, quoted with Lam, 1997: 149–150) Although there are many more examples of assisted suicide to be given, these three have in common (1) end of life in situations of (physical) insufficiency, (2) assistance by closest kin or kin group, and (3) voluntariness on the part of the person who asks for help in the last phase of life. This is not to imply that these communalities are “normal” in all non-Western cultures, or that the Western concept of voluntariness is without problems in cultures and societies that are bound by strict traditions, but the examples do share the possibility of not asking for help, which would burden the respective communities. The fact that economic circumstances—or spiritual, for that matter, in the Dinka case—play a role in these examples may indeed suggest that continuing life would be preferred if the (economic, spiritual, or whatever) necessity were not present, and could be presented as an argument

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against the so-called voluntariness. But these cases also make clear that not the obstinacy of those left behind, but the wish of the person at his or her end of life, is decisive. It is this very element that has been missing in the (pre) Western tradition: here it is the communal taboo on a self-willed end of life that prevents taking into account the serious wish to die of the elderly and/or disabled person. Some Remarks on the Western Tradition End of life, dying, and death in the Judeo-Christian tradition of Europe and the Western world in general is governed by the prohibition to use anything that ends life prematurely. Hippocrates’s oath, in the Western tradition taken by all acknowledged physicians since Antiquity,4 is the powerful expression of a medical ethics in which physicians in principle rule exclusively over life and death questions—until Nature takes over. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this medical dominance has been strongly reinforced by increasing scientific and technological knowledge, which turned many potentially deadly diseases into a temporary inconvenience. Black death, tuberculosis, and pneumonia disappeared or became relatively innocent diseases. Improved infant health care, improved medical diagnostics, and penicillin, to mention only a few, not only improved the quality of life but also postponed the moment of natural death. It was—and still is—the modern physician’s duty to save life and keep Death waiting. However, as medical practice grew more sophisticated, so did the maturity and independence of patients. Of course, the physician’s authority over his or her patient’s life has never been complete, but in the Western world since the 1970s not a few people’s consciousness with regard to illness and death developed from passive acceptance of medical authority and of fate into reflection on self-determination regarding one’s own future end. Profound secularization and growing individualization reinforced each other in some Western countries, and in a few the taboos on end-of-life issues such as euthanasia became a matter of public debate because, notwithstanding Hippocrates’s oath and clear legislation, euthanasia was practiced de facto regularly. One such country that turned from a traditionally Christian prohibitive attitude with regard to euthanasia and assisted suicide to legally tolerated, if under strict circumstances, has been the Netherlands, a small West European democratic state of strong Christian tradition but secularizing rapidly since the 1960s5—and putting an end to death-denying society, as the influential French historian Phillipe Ariès has called Western culture. As a result of an intense public and parliamentary discussion, in combination with two


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successive governments without religiously inspired parties in power, the Netherlands now has a unique euthanasia law that has elicited admiration as well as severe condemnation abroad. It is instructive to describe this law in terms of the five phases in which a request for euthanasia may end in one’s death earlier without medical assistance. Applying Euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide in the Netherlands (Law since January 1, 2002) This law developed on the basis of medical practice since 1998, and the practice itself was gedoogd (“tolerated”6 ) since 1984 when the Dutch House of Representatives took the first initiative of law. Taken in a temporal sequence, applying euthanasia always consists of (1) the patient’s initiative (request), (2) the physician’s decision—if positive, (3) verifying the patient’s request, the situation assessment, and consultation, (4) the termination of life, and (5) the notification procedure. We’ll present and discuss the different phases, concentrating on the roles of the patient and the medical practitioner. Of course, this is a schematic7 and ideal approach; we will comment on several problems and difficulties later on. The Patient’s Initiative The patient requests euthanasia8 or assistance with suicide. The request can be an oral request or a hand-written directive. Not seldom, an oral request is followed by a written one. The written directive can be stated in general terms, and is mandatory in case of dementia. In no case is a patient’s request in itself a sufficient condition for euthanasia, but it is a necessary condition. Requests can be directed at one’s own GP or at the attending specialist in a hospital. The Physician’s Decision No physician is obliged to perform euthanasia, even if the medical criteria to be discussed later on are fully met. The physician’s full entitlement to refuse is a guarantee for the doctor’s freedom of conscience. This also applies to other medical staff who might become involved. However, if the physician addressed agrees in principle with the patient’s request, then the important procedure of applying the six “due care” criteria will be started. This leads to the next phase. Verification and Consultation In this phase, which in principle can immediately follow the patient’s request, the physician has to verify the patient’s request. Two questions

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are raised: 1. Is the patient’s request voluntary and well considered? The law requires a close doctor–patient relationship (this principle has been established in case law), and such a relationship exists when the physician knows the patient well enough to assess whether voluntary-ism and wellconsideredness plus the next criterion are applicable. 2. Is the patient suffering unbearably and is there no prospect of improvement? The criterion unbearability is of course not amenable to objective measurement, and therefore the patient’s subjective experience is taken as a starting point. Although this criterion is meant in the first place for physical illness, it does not in principal exclude psychological suffering, but on this point the public discussion and case law practice are still continuing to develop (see also criterion 5, later). Under prospect of improvement palliative care is included, and it is to this point that more medical attention has been drawn lately. We will discuss this point later on. Both criteria will prevent international “euthanasia tourism,” one of the feared consequences of the new Dutch law. The close doctor–patient relationship is also crucial in the following due care criteria: 3. The patient is to be informed about his/her situation and prospects. 4. The physician, together with the patient, comes to the conclusion that there is no reasonable alternative available in the light of the patient’s situation. Notice the absence of any other influences, in particular of close family. Even if a husband/wife or children may be present when the patient’s request is being verified and the situation assessed, it is the physician who has to conclude about these criteria, which can never be done routinely. 5. At least one physician without any connection to the case has to see the patient and give a written opinion on criteria 1–4. This external control is a safeguard against misjudgment but also an objectifying support for the physician whose help is requested. In case a patient has a psychological illness and his suffering is not primarily caused by physical complaint, a second specialist (psychiatrist) should be consulted. The consultation procedure is usually performed within a so-called SCEN-project,9 a network of GPs and other physicians trained to assist doctors facing decisions relating to the terminal stages of life. This is a way of promoting consistency in practice, although it is not obligatorily set within a SCEN-project (GPs will use their expertise


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more often than specialists in hospitals who usually ask one of their colleagues for the second opinion). Termination of Life The sixth and final criterion of due care regards the termination of life and can only be met after a positive confirmation of the consultation. The termination of life or providing assistance with suicide has to be done with due medical care and attention. Immediately afterwards a detailed report has to be written, which is the start of the post hoc notification procedure. Notification and Evaluation Procedure By means of this detailed written report the physician notifies the municipal pathologist of the death of the patient from nonnatural causes. The Public Prosecutor, who must give consent for the burial or cremation, is informed. However, this report must also be sent to one of the five Regional Review Committees (RRC) for the termination of life on request and assisted suicide, and here the reports of the physician and the statement of the independent physician consulted are assessed, to see whether the first physician acted in accordance with the due care criteria 1–5, focusing on the medical and decision-making procedures followed. Each RRC consists of at least one legal expert (chair), one physician, and one ethicist. The committee proceeds on the basis of majority decision-making. Within six weeks the RRC notifies the physician who terminated life on request or assisted with suicide. If okay, this means end of case: the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) will not be informed.10 Oral or written additional information by the attending physician and/or municipal pathologist and/or other relevant care providers may be requested by the RRC; this may extend the evaluation period by a maximum of six weeks. If matters are still acceptable, this means the end of the case and as above, the PPS will not be informed. In a negative case, the PPS and the Health Inspection are informed, and it is considered whether the attending physician should be prosecuted. Two main interim conclusions may be drawn: 1. Euthanasia and assistance in suicide in the Netherlands are still criminal offences in the formal sense, but the Dutch Criminal Code has been amended to exempt physicians from criminal liability if they report their actions and show they have satisfied the due care criteria and subsequent notification procedure.

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2. The aim of exempting physicians from prosecution—and the aim of the new euthanasia law itself—is to ensure that they no longer feel like criminals and act openly and honestly regarding requests for euthanasia, provided they follow the procedures correctly. No Problems Left? As said, this law (and other ones like the equally recent same-sex marriage law and legalized prostitution) is the result of an unprecedented Dutch political coalition of two liberal and one social democratic parties without Christian-Democratic influence. Does it mean that the matter is settled now? Not definitively, as will be shown with the most recent developments in the euthanasia discussion in the Netherlands, based on new experiences and some reactions from abroad. The (registered) number of cases of euthanasia and assisted suicide in the Netherlands remain relatively constant. In 2000, 2,123 cases (about 2.5% of all deaths in the Netherlands) were reported, of which 278 cases were by medical specialists in hospitals.11 There is no indication that the number of cases of euthanasia is rising since the law has become effective since January 1, 2002—in fact, a downward trend may have set in.12 However, complaints by physicians are beginning to be heard that patients, clearly stronger than before, consider the new law as a personal right that they can exercise vis-à-vis the doctor. Some patients object to the diagnosis that their suffering is not unbearable and/or that the prospects are less bleak than the patient sees it. From a “tolerated” practice of euthanasia, in which the patient was totally dependant on the physician’s willingness to cooperate, it now appears to have become an enforceable right of the patients—at least in their eyes—which puts the physician under more pressure than before. Even if the number of cases in which this applies will not be large, it does imply a tendency of instrumentalization of the physician, whose professional ethos will resist. Increased independence of the patients, common in all Western societies and certainly not restricted to end-of-life issues, is an especially important factor in times when the physician’s opinion is less authoritative than it used to be. This can grow into a movement away from giving help in requests for euthanasia. At the same time, the discussion about alternatives to euthanasia has intensified. The Netherlands is traditionally not a country where a developed system of palliative care or hospices, like in Great Britain, forms an integral part of the health care system. This medical and caregiving “specialty” has only gained attention very recently—paradoxically among the group of


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Amsterdam physicians who were involved in the system of giving second opinions, the so-called SCEN doctors. Some of them have stopped this kind of counseling because they have learned that better palliative care indeed is available, but not used. In short, euthanasia has been applied “too early” in a number of cases, or even unnecessarily, given the improved methods of accompanying patients to a ‘natural’ death. In a way, the Dutch practice of euthanasia has preceded the movement toward better palliative care, while in other countries palliative care is better or well developed—and euthanasia is practiced illegally in what is probably a considerable number of cases as well.13 A third trend, in line with the patients’ growing independence, is the discussion about the so-called Drion pill14 for elderly people who are “ready with life” and do not want to wait, sometimes long, for a fatal illness. Not assisted suicide but a simple medical device, to be taken by those who feel ready for it, at the moment of their own choice. This is, of course, the logic of euthanasia taken to its full consequence, which would create situations of medical preparedness for suicide without interference of the GP at the moment suprême. It is interesting to mention that the Minister of Health, a member of the modestly left-wing social–liberal coalition party stated personal support in favor of social and legal acceptance of such medicines—immediately after the final parliamentary debate on euthanasia in 2001. This was considered a tactless remark after the difficult discussion on euthanasia—remember that the Christian-Democrats felt overruled on a highly principled question—but very much to the point if seen from the perspective of development of more individualism. However, the political decision was taken that this discussion should not be held now or in the near future. In the same line is the last discussion, not about the elderly but about children from infancy to 12 years of age. The question has been raised whether children who suffer from a very serious, unbearable illness without the prospect of improvement15 should in principle be allowed to be euthanized. To be sure, this discussion is only applicable to highly exceptional cases—in the Netherlands 50–100 cases a year, but the number in itself is of no significance. The criteria of voluntariness and unbearableness are not applicable to these cases: these children, mostly infants, cannot properly express their wishes and feelings, but the nature of their illness is such that “unbearable suffering” can be objectified to a great extent. Medical technology is capable of keeping these children alive for some time, and in some cases even beyond the age of 16, but as soon as medical treatment is ended death will follow. These cases of medically “senseless” treatment could be arranged under the heading of passive euthanasia that are different from active euthanasia: cases

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in which child-patients can survive without intensive medical treatment but who will be confronted with a life of very serious suffering. Two cases have been documented and were reviewed in court. One case was a newborn infant with a very serious and extended form of spina bifida; the other case involved a child with an aberrant number of chromosomes, a syndrome leading irrevocably to a limited period of life. Active ending of life was applied because—after intensive and multiple collegial consultations— it was concluded that serious suffering would not be avoided in any other way. In both cases the attending physicians were accused of murder by the Criminal Court, and the charges were declared proven. No punishment was imposed because the medical plea of force majeure, in the sense of high emergency, was accepted by the Court. This cancelled punishability but the physicians were not acquitted, which means that a court has made the official judgment that they have committed murder. This is a very high price for doctors who acted extremely carefully but put the interest of the child in the first place. Had these patients been grown ups and able to express themselves, then these cases would have complied with the six due care criteria, after which euthanasia could have been performed. Why is a child not allowed to be freed from its suffering without any perspective—and adults are? Is it thought that a child cannot suffer seriously and desperately? Or even that children cannot suffer at all? Or is it thought that suffering of children is not to be judged at all?16 Slightly different are cases of children in the age group 13–16, suffering from cancer that has reached an incurable stage and who expressed clearly and consistently the wish to die, but who have parents who refuse to agree. All these result in a small number of individual cases in which the new euthanasia law does not provide an answer, and given the constant threat of criminal prosecution in these “border cases,” it is understandable that juridical elaboration is requested. However, after 8 years of Dutch coalition politics without the Christian-Democrats, it has been demonstrated very clearly by the Dutch voters in the 2002 elections that they do not wish this so-called purple coalition to return. This may well have consequences for Dutch euthanasia policy.17 One new aspect that has come to light is the difference between euthanasia applied by the GPs, at the patient’s home or in hospital, and that by the medical specialists in hospitals. Articles have been published (and questions have been raised in Dutch Parliament) about euthanasia cases in hospitals where specialists, confronted with requests for euthanasia, comply with the fifth due care criterion—consultation of an independent physician to confirm the diagnosis of the doctor in charge—by asking more or less routinely


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for this second opinion only among their colleagues in hospital. Cases have been reported in which the second opinion physician, working in the same hospital, took only 20–30 minutes to talk with the patient who requested euthanasia. Experienced SCEN doctors (see note 9, in this chapter) think that two hours should be the standard time to be taken for this important due care criterion, but this is not regulated. That is not to say that the euthanasia procedure in hospitals is not properly executed according to the law, but apparently the medical specialist’s being less well acquainted with the patient—if at all (compared to the General Practitioners), makes a more routinely followed procedure more likely. Of course, this situation will differ from hospital to hospital. It illustrates once more, however, that with having put the law into full operation, not all problems have been solved and that actual new practice is forming new interpretations of the law—a normal phenomenon in social life. Of quite another magnitude are the reactions from abroad. As has been made clear, the Netherlands was unique with this law (meanwhile, Belgium has followed suit18 ), and it is interesting to mention some of these reactions, both in (semi-)official and media environments. Apart from Vatican City, whose official journal Osservatore Romano has repeatedly compared the Dutch euthanasia law with the practices of Nazi Germany, the most negative reactions came from Germany, the Netherlands’ eastern neighbor. Euthanasia, as is well known, was practiced clandestinely but widely in the Nazi era, aiming at liquidating “useless” and “worthless” life (meaning the chronically ill and mentally handicapped). In Germany, the concept of euthanasia is strictly taboo, and so is every notion about regulation by law. Referring to their tragic history, German commentators claim that they, as Germans, know how quickly euthanasia can derail and end in disaster. This comparison, though fed by well-meant concern, is of course completely false with respect to history; the required voluntary and repeated wish of the patient and the criterion of unbearable suffering plus the lack of a perspective of improvement, to mention only these criteria, are a world apart from any Nazi practice.19 It is ironic that the Dutch, who still have problems with Germany because of the occupation in the 1940–1945 period, have been read a lesson by the German President Johannes Rau who, shortly after the Dutch euthanasia law had been passed, referred explicitly to those very dark pages in German history. German policy-makers are apparently more haunted by history than 70 percent of the German people who, according to opinion polls, would support a euthanasia law inspired by the Dutch one.20 Another difference between the Dutch and German way of thinking on bioethical issues is more of a philosophical tradition: Dutch canal diggers

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pragmatism versus German principles regarding the inviolable value of life and a certain philosophical scholasticism.21 German press reactions, especially the more conservative papers like Die Welt and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, were negative as reported in the American press.22 In England some papers are clearly in favor of following the Dutch example,23 but even a Labor-led British government doesn’t dare to start a public discussion on the theme of euthanasia. British case law, which is much more important in the English legal system than in continental Europe, so far consistently refuses to legalize medical practice. Diana Pretty, a British terminally ill and almost totally paralyzed British woman who sought exemption of criminal investigation and charges for her husband if he were to help her to die, was denied that wish, and even an attempt to enforce the request via the European Court of Human Rights failed.24 The history of Dutch euthanasia law has made it clear that it was case law that “legalized” euthanasia, accompanied by a political majority to “tolerate” a medical practice which de jure was murder. Since the process of European integration gained momentum, it has eroded national sovereignty in many policy areas like trade, economic competition, and currency stability, but other areas remain firmly national, such as health care. However, as the case of Diana Pretty before the European Court of Human Rights has demonstrated, there is a chance that this Court of Appeal will judge the Dutch euthanasia law illegal. Dutch ChristianDemocrat members of the European Parliament have already tried to obstruct Dutch euthanasia law along this route, but have failed so far.25 Now, however, a new instance of jurisprudence at the European level has been produced, and with a new Dutch government, dominated again by ChristianDemocrats, it may well be that a new attempt is more successful. The conclusion will be clear: the Netherlands (and Belgium) will remain isolated, as far as the legislation regarding active euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide is concerned. Turning back Dutch euthanasia law in the near future isn’t at all unimaginable. On the other hand, opinion polls in most European countries show large majorities in favor of legalizing what is happening anyhow in medical practice. A Tentative Conclusion Is the Dutch health care policy, in which pragmatism and careful regulation ex post with regard to end-of-life issues like euthanasia is widely supported by the population and by the biggest part of the medical profession, an example to be followed, or not? Evolutionary analysis may help to connect medical


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practice in modern Western society with the practice of assisted self-willed death in quite different cultures. Human children are on average long dependent on their parents, in particular on the mother. In traditional societies these parents themselves often rely on their own parents for all kinds of assistance. Three-generation families are quite normal all over the world, even in Western societies, well into the twentieth century. In small, traditional, nonhierarchical societies the elderly are valued because of their experience and wisdom, and as long as they can contribute to the common good of the (kinship) group, they are respected and taken care for as long as possible. In economically marginal societies, tradition may artificially shorten the lives of the elderly who consider themselves a burden to the community. The same tradition, however, requires that the initiative to end life be taken by the old or sick person him/herself. Familial attachment, as the Japanese and Inuit examples showed, is strong enough to delay the moment of the final voyage. The self-chosen moment of death, in accordance with tradition and in cooperation with close kin, is not only worthy in the cultural context of one’s own group but also highly functional. Why have these elements been abandoned in modern, large-scale societies? One answer is that the Judeo-Christian tradition—but this applies to non-Western mass societies as well—has drawn the control over premature death into the political realm of power. If the legitimate power structure is allowed to decide matters of life and death, be it in the form of capital punishment or the acclaimed universal and absolute right to life of every human being, then in principle all people are subject to the exercise of social power: their own life is not theirs, but society’s. Not only murder is prohibited, but even self-killing (unless for the sake of the community in self-defense and war). The prohibition to attempt suicide, until recently punishable in most developed countries and still strongly condemned by all major religions, denies the ultimate right of an individual to withdraw from his social duties before the moment of his natural death. Religion in large-scale society of all ages is a collective argumentation against this kind of individuality, which is paradoxically illustrated by the self-sacrifice of Japanese kamikaze pilots in the Second World War and by suicidal attacks in the jihad against Israel and the West. Individuality, however, is not by definition non- or antisocial, but it is indeed nonconformist. In a death-denying culture like the economichedonistic Western one, death and dying have been abnormalized and marginalized, and the old adage memento mori has become an undesirable reminder that the feast of life is finite. However, the public-political dimension of social power is changing, depending on national and historical experiences. Modern societies that can

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escape the influence of religion in end-of-life issues like euthanasia and physician assisted suicide, can pursue a realistic policy with regard to individual and collective concern for death. If nobody is forced to choose death at 70 or at whatever higher age, but neither to “live” on beyond one’s own mental and physical carrying capacity, then the macro-social problem of ageing may become somewhat less pressing in the near future. A general, well-informed consciousness of the evolutionary ratio of life, in particular of Williams’s theory of senescence, will help to relativize our presumed absolute uniqueness or sacredness, and to realize the major significance of John Maynard Keynes’s sober truism—in the end we are all dead. Notes This chapter is an elaboration of a paper presented by both authors at the 21st Annual Meeting of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences in Charleston, SC, on October 19, 2001. E-mail: [email protected] and [email protected]. 1. Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all strictly forbid all forms of suicide and euthanasia (Karim et al., 1998). Buddhism does not forbid passive euthanasia and fasting to death, but all other methods are strictly forbidden. Most modern sects, cults, and pseudo-religions in the secularizing Western world follow their forbears in this rejection of euthanasia and (assisted) suicide. 2. Lam (1997) is a Dutch Ph.D. thesis with a 5-page English summary. Its uniqueness lies in reviewing and comparing age-old or traditional non-Western forms of euthanasia and assisted suicide with the modern Dutch practice. A translation into English would be highly welcome. 3. The book’s cover bears a reproduction of Yoshitoshi Taiso’s (1839–1892) very intimate print of The Moon at Obasute Yama. Obasute is the mountain where old women are left behind. The print shows a steep mountain with a large, heavy pine (symbol of old age), behind which the moon (symbol of transience) is shining. A man carries an old woman on his bowed back. He is going uphill, and the woman has her arms around his neck, illustrating her cooperation. 4. For ancient and modern versions of the Hippocratic Oath, see www.pbs.org/ cgi-bin/wgbh. 5. Since its origin in the 1570s, the Netherlands—then a quite unique republic among absolutist monarchies—was strongly Calvinistic-oriented, with a large Catholic minority and other smaller protestant denominations. In the twentieth century, Dutch coalitional politics secured a continuous Christian-Democratic grip on government until 1994 when a coalition between social democrats and two liberal parties created for the first time since the nineteenth century a nonChristian–oriented majority in government and parliament, a conditio sine qua non for a fundamental change in the legislation of end-of-life issues. However, earlier governments with moderate Christian-Democrats in coalition cabinets tolerated the


6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

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evolved practice of closely monitored euthanasia (i.e., under specified circumstances physicians could assist in euthanasia cases without being charged in criminal courts, even if it remained forbidden by law). This practice developed since 1973 on the basis of jurisprudence/case law—creating in 1984 a situation of quasi-acceptance of a clearly forbidden practice. After a long public debate, and after 1983, in Parliament as well, a unique law legalizing conditioned euthanasia was accepted and came into force in January 1, 2002. See Muntendam et al. (1977) and Kennedy (2002) for two moments in the history of Dutch euthanasia law. Gedogen is a concept that is difficult to translate, which means tolerating something that is formally forbidden. Turning a blind eye is too passive; it mostly resembles accepting that in practice it is difficult or impossible to effectively control certain situations (perhaps the American idea of “unruly practices” comes closest; see van Oenen, 2002). Another well-known example of gedogen is the acceptance of a distinction between soft and hard drugs (doesn’t exist in the United States), which makes it possible to buy without any problems a small portion (5 grams) of marihuana for one’s own use in so-called coffee shops in Dutch towns. However, it is still forbidden to trade larger quantities than 5 grams, and how the coffee shops get their weed is one of the paradoxes of this culture of “tolerance.” One can imagine that neighboring countries with stricter laws on drug abuse put pressure on the Netherlands to change this drug policy, which, by the way, is a part of the national health policy (leaving the struggle against hard drugs to the Ministry of Justice). We realize that gedogen is practiced everywhere in the world, but in the Netherlands in some areas of policy it has been cultivated beyond imagination. For a foreign, liberal appreciation, see John Peet (2002). This scheme has been composed on the basis of various documents in English and Dutch, made available by the Dutch Ministries of Foreign Affairs (see www.minbuza.nl) and Justice (see www.minjust.nl). Euthanasia in the Netherlands is defined as termination of life by a physician on request of a patient. Euthanasia is explicitly not: desisting from treatment when further intervention is pointless and allowing nature to take its course—this is accepted medical practice, sometimes called passive euthanasia, but here we deal only with active euthanasia. SCEN: Steun en Consultatie bij Euthanasie in Nederland [Support and Consultation with Euthanasia in the Netherlands], so to speak the ex ante body of assistance for physicians confronted with requests for euthanasia, is to be distinguished from the ex post evaluation committees RRC. Until January 1, 2002, the RRC was obliged to report to the PPS anyhow. However, the PPS is always free to start an investigation in any case where there is reason to suspect that a crime has been committed. de Gruyter, “Specialist heeft geen tijd voor de dood,” in NRC Handelsblad April 29, 2002. de Gruyter, “Toetsingscommissies zijn onbescheiden,” in NRC Handelsblad May 23, 2002. Based on reports received in 1999, 2,216 cases were reported; 2,123 in 2000;

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14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

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and 2,054 in 2001. Two factors are supposed to contribute to this decrease: physicians more often than before choose for palliative care (to be discussed later) and—more problematic—because doctors might shy away from reporting again because the official evaluation committees RRC dig deeper than the Public Prosecution did in the 1990s. Opponents of euthanasia point out the presumed economic motive behind it: euthanasia is practiced because the palliative care alternative is not available for economic reasons—not an irrelevant argument in the Dutch health care system that is practically financially out of control. But this is not convincing, since the Netherlands have a very extended system of care for the elderly, which is basically tax paid. The result is that the Dutch population has about the highest average age of all developed countries in the world. However, this statistical measure doesn’t say much about the quality of life at one’s life-end, which, of course, is the main argument for an individual patient to consider euthanasia. As long as there remains a choice for the patient, nobody will object to organize more palliative health care. We should also not forget that euthanasia usually shortens life by only a few days or weeks. Huib Drion, a former vice-president of the Dutch Supreme Court, was in 1991 the first intellectual in the Netherlands who pleaded for social and legal acceptance of availablility of deadly medicines on request for the highly aged. E.g., Sauer and Verhagen, “Arts moet kind uit uitzichtloos lijden kunnen verlossen,” in NRC Handelsblad February 9, 2002. See Sauer and Verhagen, 2002: 8. The Dutch 2002 election campaign was highly and unusually controversial, exactly because a broad vox populi opposition against this “purple” coalition (purple, because the social-democratic red has been mixed with the liberal blue) was effectively mobilized by the maverick politician Pim Fortuyn, who was murdered shortly before the elections took place. Though the basis of his campaign was anti-immigration and law and order, it is to be expected that a new government with the Christian-Democrats at the helm will block any extension of the euthanasia law, or may even try to turn the clock back. See de Volkskrant May 7, 2002. The reader him/herself may answer the question whether this also applies to the discussion and very incidental practice of active ending of life with young children, as described earlier. As described in the previous footnote, the recently accepted Belgian euthanasia law goes further with respect to the category of the most serious cases of mental illness. The Belgian Catholic hierarchy intends to have this law declared contrary to the European Convention of Human Rights. NRC Handelsblad March 2, 2002, “Lastig debat met Duitsers,” and April 28, 2002, “Duits debat over euthanasie mist elke nuance.” de Volkskrant March 2, 2002, “Kanaalgravers en principedenkers.” New York Times April 12, 2001, “Horror expressed in Germany over Dutch euthanasia.” Reactions in the United States were varied, referring to the Oregon


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practice, but more negative arguments were heard than positive ones. Newsweek June 4, 2001, devoted its front cover article to the Dutch practice of gedogen: “Sexual freedom, legalized drugs, euthanasia: Is Holland pointing the way toward Europe’s future?” 23. E.g., The Independent April 10, 2001, leader. 24. New York Times May 13, 2002. 25. They felt supported by a 2001 U.N. Human Rights Commission report expressing concern about the Dutch practice of euthanasia, based on this new law. See Falger (1998) for a totally different case of (in this case orthodox) religious influence in Dutch politics.

References Buss, David M. (1999). Evolutionary Psychology. The New Science of the Mind. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Cartwright, John. (2000). Evolution and Human Behavior. Darwinian Perspectives on Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Book/MIT Press. de Gruyter, R. (2002a). Specialist heeft geen tijd voor de dood [Specialist has no time for death; in Dutch]. NRC Handelsblad April 29, 2002: 3. ——. (2002b). Toetsingscommissies zijn onbescheiden [Evaluation committees are indiscreet; in Dutch]. NRC Handelsblad May 23, 2002. Dorson, R. M. (1962). Folk Legends of Japan. Rutland, VM, Tokyo: Tuttle. Falger, Vincent S. E. (1998). Dangerous ideas in Dutch politics: Evolutionary theory as a political issue in the Netherlands. In Vincent S. E. Falger, Peter Meyer, and Johan M. G. van der Dennen (Eds.), Sociobiology and Politics. Stamford, CT/London: JAI Press. Karim, A. B. M. F. et al. (Eds.). (1998). Death. Medical, Spiritual and Social Care for the Dying. Amsterdam: VU University Press. Kennedy, James. (2001). Een Weloverwogen Dood [A Well Considered Death; in Dutch]. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker. Lam, Hans. (1997). Helpen bij Sterven. Levensbeëindiging op Verzoek in Verschillende Samenlevingen [Assisted Death. Termination of Life on Request in Different Societies; in Dutch]. Amsterdam/Overveen: Boom/Belvédère. Muntendam, P. (Ed.). (1977). Euthanasie [Euthanasia; in Dutch]. Leiden: Stafleu. Peet, John. (2002). A survey of the Netherlands. The Economist May 4, 2002: 56. Sauer, P. J. J. and A. A. E. Verhagen. (2002). Arts moet kind uit uitzichtloos lijden kunnen verlossen [Physician should be able to release child out of its misery without perspective; in Dutch]. NRC Handelsblad February 9, 2002: 8. Simmons, L. W. (1970). The Role of the Aged in Primitive Society. Hamden, CT, (1945, 1st edition). van Oenen, Gijs (Ed.). (2002). Ongeregelde Orde. Gedogen en de Omgang met Wilde Praktijken [Unruled Order. Gedogen and Dealing with Unruly Practices; in Dutch]. Amsterdam: Boom.

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Westermarck, E. (1913). Ursprung und Entwicklung der Moralbegriffe [Origin and Development of Moral Notions; in German]. Leipzig: Klinkhardt. Wisse, J. (1933). Selbstmord und Todesfurcht bei Naturvölkern [Suicide and Fear of Death with Premodern Peoples; in German]. Zuthphen: Thieme.

Periodicals de Volkskrant [Dutch daily paper]. New York Times. Newsweek. NRC Handelsblad [Dutch daily paper]. The Independent [British daily paper].

CHAPTER 7

Biosocial Theorizing and Criminal Justice Policy* Lee Ellis

Introduction

A

ll criminologists recognize the importance of social variables in crime causation but, unfortunately, most still turn a blind eye to the contribution of biological variables. In a recent survey, a colleague and I found that less than ten percent of American criminologists consider biological variables important in explaining variations in criminal and delinquent behavior (Ellis and Walsh, 1999). Despite the continued unpopularity of criminological theories that jointly consider biological and socio-learning variables, I predict that such theories will gradually come to dominate the field of criminology over the next quarter of a century. Already, an overwhelmingly amount of evidence has been amassed to supports a genetic-influence hypothesis with respect to criminal behavior (Ellis and Walsh, 2000: 436). In addition, numerous studies have implicated a whole host of other biological factors in crime causation (Ellis and Walsh, 2000: 268–303). Knowing that biological factors influence criminal behavior and formulating a theory that can reasonably account for such influences are obviously not the same. This chapter offers a biosocial theory that I believe can go a long way toward explaining most of what is currently known about the influence of biological factors on criminal behavior. The theory incorporates genetic, evolutionary, hormonal, and brain functioning variables, along with learning and social environmental variables. It began to coalesce in my mind

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over twenty years ago as a way of accounting for why most persistent offenders are males, particularly during their second and third decades of life (Ellis, 1981). Nevertheless, I will show that in its present form the theory helps to explain numerous other aspects of criminal/antisocial behavior. By criminal behavior, I mean behavior that victimizes others in ways that are so repugnant to a society’s legislators (and their constituents) that laws have been passed to punish those who engage in this type of behavior. Attention here will be confined to victimizing forms of offending, although I have contended elsewhere that elements of the theory to be proposed can also explain propensities to engage in most types of victimless offending (Ellis, 1987, 1991).

Evolutionary Neuroandrogenic Theory The theory to be presented is called the evolutionary neuroandrogenic (ENA) theory of criminal behavior (Ellis and Walsh, 2000: 476). In a nutshell, ENA theory asserts that genes have evolved to produce testosterone and other sex hormones to varying degrees and to orchestrate multiple influences of these hormones on brain functioning. These varying brain functioning patterns have evolved to incline adolescent and young adult males toward victimizing others in ways that are universally recognized as “criminal” (or some equivalent non-English term). After presenting the theory, some specific hypotheses are derived from it, including hypotheses relevant to the future functioning of the criminal justice system. ENA theory has two main conceptual components, hereafter called planks: an evolutionary plank and a neuroandrogenic plank. Each plank will be described separately and then combined to comprise the basic arguments for the theory. The Evolutionary Plank At the highest level of generality, evolution refers to the astounding changes in life forms that are revealed in the fossil record. At a much lower level of generality, evolution encompasses minute alterations in the frequency of various genes that comprise existing species. These changes in gene frequency are responsible for the dazzling varieties of domestic plants and animals that have been fashioned in recent centuries from wild stock. ENA theory asserts that genes conducive to criminal/antisocial behavior have evolved not through intentional human intervention, but primarily through individual adaptation to increasingly complex sociocultural systems.

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The much belied Cesare Lombroso (1911) deserves credit for having first proposed that evolutionary forces may be responsible for criminal behavior. He asserted that criminals were essentially “evolutionary throwbacks” to an earlier stage of human life. While agreeing with Lombroso’s premise that evolutionary forces are at work, ENA theory virtually turns his proposal on its head. According to ENA theory, natural selection often favors criminality more today than has been true historically. In other words, instead of depicting criminals as “atavistic,” ENA theory asserts (1) that virtually everyone has at least some genetic propensities toward criminal/antisocial behavior, and (2) that the reproductive advantages to such behavior may be greater today than ever before. Today, the reproductive advantage of offending often comes from a low probability of being detected and punished relative to centuries past when communities were much smaller and less anonymous. Also, in modern ethnically diverse societies, the victims of crimes are less likely to be close genetic relatives than is true in small closely knit communities. Nevertheless, at the same time natural selection has favored those who engage in victimizing behavior as societies enlarge and diversify, evolution has also favored those who sought to prevent themselves and close genetic relatives from being victimized. This means that crime prevention and treatment should have coevolved along with rising threats of crime victimization. Natural Selection Darwin defined natural selection in terms of differential rates of reproduction brought about by ever-changing environmental conditions. Obviously, for most species, the main environmental changes that bring about differential reproduction involve either the physical surroundings (such as the climate) or the presence of prey and predator species in the region. For humans, another strong force affecting reproduction rates is the sociocultural environment that we have collectively fashioned as a result of the everaccumulating collective wisdom made possible through language. This gene-based version of evolutionary theory leaves wide open the possibility that genes affect not only physical traits, but also behavior tendencies. Genes do not code directly for behavior, but can affect behavior by altering the structure and biochemistry of the brain as it responds to environmental conditions. Sexual Selection Darwin (1872) insightfully extended his concept of natural selection to include a special subtype that he called sexual selection. Sexual selection means differential reproduction brought about through the interaction of

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males and females of a given species (Ellis, 2003). To illustrate how sexual selection can occur, suppose that in some hypothetical species a mutant male resides who has inherited a trait that makes him unusually attractive to most of the females. Assume that the trait that is attractive to the opposite sex has no effect on the survival prospects of this male relative to other males. In other words, he was no more or less likely to be captured by predators or infected by parasites than were his male peers. If this mutant male is fertile and takes advantage of the extra mating opportunities garnered by his appearance, a growing proportion of males with this mutant gene will be present in each new generation. Even if this male runs a higher risk of dying at a young age relative to his less attractive male cohorts, he might still pass on his genes to future generations at unusually high rates because so many females are attracted to him. This hypothetical mutant male provides a simple example of what is meant by sexual selection. Notice that while the male is carrying the gene for the unusual trait, it is only because of a female preference for the trait that the gene for the trait becomes increasingly more prevalent in the population. The driving force behind sexual selection has come to be called female choice. It is assumed that female choice is nearly always a much stronger evolutionary force than any corresponding “male choice” because females of most species have a much lower “reproductive ceiling” than is true for males. This low reproductive potential means that females will be favored for being choosy and restrictive in mating much more than should be the case for males (Ellis, 2003). Now consider a more complex imaginary example of sexual selection, one that will serve to directly illustrate the evolutionary plank of ENA theory. Suppose (without evidence for the time being) that genes promoting competitive/victimizing behavior have evolved in the human species. By competitive behavior, let us mean behavior that is focused on obtaining non-plentiful resources that facilitate living and reproducing. Victimizing behavior goes beyond mere competition for resources in that it actively deprives a conspecific (member of ones own species) from resources and/or the ability to obtain or retain resources. In human terms, victimizing behavior not only takes the form of violent and property crimes, but also includes the use of deceptive business practices and even the reckless endangerment of the lives of other, whether these latter acts are illegal or not. Genes Conducive to Competitive/Victimizing Behavior According to ENA theory, genes have evolved that incline all humans to be competitive and victimizing toward others to varying degrees, but these


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tendencies are more extreme in males than in females. The specific nature of this fundamental proposition is represented in figure 7.1. In order for this assumption to be correct, the Y-chromosome must carry one or more genes that promotes competitive/victimizing behavior because this is the only chromosome that male and female mammals do not share. Theoretically, many other genes (on the X-chromosome and the 22 pairs of autosomes) may be affecting competitive/victimizing behavior in various ways, but there must be at least one gene on the Y-chromosome that promotes this behavior. ENA theory asserts that both competitive and victimizing behavior have been sexually selected. This means that males who exhibit either of these behavioral patterns to a high degree have more of an edge in passing their genes on to future generations than is true for the average female. Basically, as shown in figure 7.1, the peaks in each of the two distribution curves represent the optimum in reproduction for both sexes as far as the display of competitive/victimizing tendencies are concerned. Figure 7.1 predicts that males will be more likely to engage in victimizing behavior than is true for females. As a type of victimizing behavior, criminality is explained by ENA theory as ultimately a genetic response to female preferences in mate selection. In other words, males who are most able to procure resources will be chosen as sex partners by females more often than other males. Another factor operating to favor victimizing behavior among males is that males can often use such behavior to ward off rival males and to sexually assault females who do not choose them as sex partners. According to ENA theory, victimizing tactics have not evolved among females to the extent that one finds these tactics among males due to sexual

Prevalence

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Low

Involvement in competitive/victimizing behavior

High

Figure 7.1 Prevalence of male–female involvement in competitive/victimizing behavior

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selection. Specifically, only females have been favored by natural selection for choosing mates on the basis of their competence in resource procurement (Ellis, 2001). It is important to note that ENA theory recognizes that environmental factors can heavily influence the course of victimizing behavior in a population. For example, as the size of a community increases, victimizing behavior should also increase because as community size gets larger, the probability of victimizers being identified and imprisoned (thus at least temporarily preventing them from reproducing) diminishes. Thus, over numerous generations, victimizers living in large communities should become proportionally more numerous than in small communities. This prediction may be offset by enhanced crime detection, more vigorous prosecutions, longer sentences, and other refinements in the functioning of the criminal justice system, such as increased use of DNA technology. Regarding the age at which competitive/victimizing behavior is most likely to occur, ENA theory predicts that while playful practicing forms may appear early in childhood, serious forms should roughly coincide with the onset of puberty, since puberty marks the beginning of one’s reproductive career. However, while general forms of competitive/victimizing behavior should persist throughout the remainder of one’s reproductive years, criminal behavior should subside within a few years to the degree that offenders are apprehended, punished, and are able to learn alternative forms of competitive behavior that are minimally victimizing. In other words, criminal behavior should be most common during adolescence, except for individuals who have difficulties learning other ways of obtaining resources with which to attract mates. Neuroandrogenic Plank Androgens are sometimes called “male sex hormones,” although females also produce these hormones, but in lower quantities than is true for males. Especially following the onset of puberty, male androgen levels skyrocket, as shown in figure 7.2. The most widely studied, and probably the most important androgen from a behavioral standpoint, is testosterone. Testosterone: Hell’s Hormone With few exceptions, studies have found significant positive correlations between circulating testosterone levels and physical aggression in postpubertal male animals (e.g., Lincoln et al., 1972; Albert et al., 1986; Mehlman et al., 1997). Similarly, significant positive correlations between


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10 Average testosterone levels (with females at age 10 = 1)

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8 6 4

+ 2

+ 1st

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40

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Years of age

Figure 7.2 Testosterone levels of human males and females from conception through old age

circulating levels of testosterone and adult criminality, especially of a violent nature, have also been repeatedly found (e.g., Dabbs and Morris, 1990; Bergman and Brismar, 1994; Virkkunen et al., 1994; Mazur, 1995: 289; Soler et al., 2000). A recent study from Spain even found a significant positive correlation between testosterone levels and engaging in “serious” (but not “playful”) aggression in preadolescent boys (Sanchez-Martin et al., 2000). According to ENA theory, testosterone is central to understanding the gender differences in criminal offending that have been documented throughout the world (Ellis and Walsh, 2000: 102; Ellis, 2000: 6). This means that males are more criminal than females on average because their brains have been exposed to higher levels of testosterone (and other androgens). Three important qualifications need to be made regarding this generalization. The first qualification involves distinguishing two stages in sexually differentiating the brain: the perinatal stage and the postpubertal stage. During the perinatal stage, the neurological foundations for overtly competitive/ victimizing behavior are organized, although much will lie dormant throughout the first decade of life. At puberty, brain functioning is fully activated in accordance with perinatal exposure to testosterone, marking the start of the postpubertal stage. From this time forward, competitive/victimizing behavior should have the greatest probability of being expressed in forms deemed criminal once adjustments are made for an individual’s learning and

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planning abilities. As explained later, the higher these abilities, the more rapidly an individual’s competitive/victimizing behavior will be expressed in noncriminal ways following the onset of puberty. Second, while testosterone inclines individuals toward competitive/ victimizing behavior, trial-and-error learning can often provide individuals with feedback on how to express such behavior in ways that are deemed minimally criminal. The importance of trial-and-error learning means that those who are most intelligent, least learning disabled, and best at long-term planning will persist in offending the least following puberty. Especially when reared in environments that provide opportunities to become proficient at legal forms of competitive/victimizing behavior, high-testosterone individuals should become tomorrow’s business tycoons and community leaders. Hightestosterone individuals of relatively low learning and planning ability, on the other hand, are likely to persist in offending well beyond adolescence. Third, because androgens are produced by females as well as by males (see figure 7.2), competitive/victimizing behavior will not be an exclusively male phenomenon. As noted earlier, such behavior should have been naturally selected most strongly among females whose ancestors relied the least on males for resource provisioning. The importance of learning and planning abilities should be as important in females as they are in males for predicting how long females continue to express their competitive/victimizing behavior in ways that are illegal. How Brains Promote Competitive/Victimizing Behavior ENA theory asserts that there are at least three aspects of brain functioning affected by androgen exposure, all of which promote competitive/victimizing behavior. These neurological effects are termed suboptimal arousal, seizure susceptibility, and rightward shifting in neocortical functioning, each of which is discussed separately in the following. Suboptimal Arousal refers to brain functioning patterns that are generally less responsive to incoming stimuli. Symptoms of suboptimal arousal are a lowered sensitivity to pain, a greater tolerance of aversive stimuli, and a susceptibility to boredom under “normal” environmental conditions (Ellis, 1987). Individuals who are suboptimally aroused often seek unusually high levels of stimulation and will take substantial risks in the process. Seizure Susceptibility refers to the fact that for a minority of people the nervous system will at least occasionally exhibit spasmodic discharges of electrical impulses known as seizures. When seizures persist, they are diagnosed


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as epilepsy, especially when they affect consciousness and overall coordination. However, some seizures are sub-convulsive in the sense that they only affect areas of the brain that pertain to emotions or thought process unrelated to consciousness and coordination. If these sub-convulsive seizures occur in brain regions in or around the limbic system, the result may be bursts of emotional feelings that can induce violence. According to ENA theory, exposing the brain to testosterone increases its susceptibility to most seizures, including those linked to impulsive violent outbursts. These outbursts are particularly likely to occur when an individual is under emotional stress or repeated frustration. The neocortex is divided into two parts called hemispheres. According to ENA theory, while higher thought for most people occurs predominantly in the left (language) hemisphere, for those whose brains are exposed to high levels of testosterone, the right (non-language) hemisphere tends to contribute increasingly to higher thought, a phenomenon known as a rightward shift in neocortical functioning. Individuals with such a rightward shift should pay less attention to language and display other behavioral tendencies associated with greater right hemispheric functioning. Studies have indicated that the right hemisphere exhibits a more negative “emotional tone” than does the left hemisphere (Davidson and Fox, 1989; Dawson et al., 1992; Fox et al., 1992; Schaffer et al., 1983; Silberman and Weingartner, 1986). This plus the difficulty the right hemisphere has with language suggests that males, especially those who are most involved in criminal behavior, will have greater difficulty with language and will be less “friendly” than females, especially those who are least criminal. How Brains Inhibit Criminal Forms of Competitive/Victimizing Behavior ENA theory asserts that brain functioning is central to people’s varying tendencies to engage in criminal behavior, with the assumption that no two brains function exactly alike. Theoretically, some areas of the brain promote offending while other areas usually inhibit it. Central to inhibition, according to ENA theory, is the ability to learn subtle cues from experience and to plan meaningful courses of action in accordance with the presence or absence of those cues. Intelligence is considered a generalized neurological ability primarily involving the neocortex. Presumably, intelligence reflects an ability to learn adaptively useful ideas and relationships. Even more important than intelligence and learning ability is the ability to accurately anticipate consequences of various courses of action and to plan flexible alternatives when roadblocks arise, all without losing sight of the desired outcome. This flexible planning

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ability—called executive functions (or executive control )—resides primarily in the frontal lobes, especially their prefrontal region (Asher, 1982: 3; Passler et al., 1985; Fuster, 1995; Barkley, 1997). In other words, the prefrontal lobes mediate an individual’s ability to shift strategies in response to feedback (Tomarken and Keener, 1998: 401). The brain’s prefrontal area is also intimately connected to motivational and emotion-control centers in the limbic system (Davidson et al., 2000: 592; Strayhorn, 2002a: 11). It is not surprising, therefore, that even subtle damage or disruptions to the functioning of the prefrontal lobes can result in poor moral decision-making (Anderson et al., 1999). Furthermore, a recent MRI scan of psychopaths and nonpsychopaths indicated that the former had limbic systems that were subresponsive to emotional stimuli as well as frontal lobes that were functioning with below normal limbic system input (Kiehl et al., 2001). The main neurotransmitter that helps to maintain the functioning of this limbic-frontal lobe circuitry is serotonin. When serotonin is fairly active, people report feeling calm and contented; when it is inactive, anxiety and depression often ensue (Kalus et al., 1989; Plaznik et al., 1989). Depleted serotonergic activity has been repeatedly linked to violent criminal/antisocial behavior (reviewed by Ellis and Walsh, 2000: 288; Dolan et al., 2002). As with brain functioning linked to intelligence, the causes of variations in frontal lobe functioning appear to involve a complex interplay of both genetic and environmental factors (Davidson et al., 2000: 591). Some of the environmental factors are likely to occur perinatally, while others may take place throughout the remainder of one’s life, with varying degrees of reversibility. Hypotheses Derived from ENA Theory Many testable hypotheses may be derived from ENA theory, some of which are presented in the following along with some of the relevant evidence. Two categories of hypothesis are presented: general hypotheses and hypotheses relevant to the criminal justice system. General Hypotheses Gender and Age Nothing is more basic to ENA theory than the hypothesis that males will be more inclined toward victimizing others than females. While victimizing behavior is essentially any behavior that does more to harm someone than help them, it often does not rise to the level of seriousness to be declared criminal by a societal legislative body. To a considerable extent, experience is


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required to “sense” the difference between what risks a run-in with the law and what only minimally does so. Theoretically, while behavioral precursors to crime are apparent in childhood, crime per se is rare up to the onset of puberty when males have been favored for beginning to compete in earnest for resources (Ellis, 2003). Most males will at least experiment with victimizing tactics soon thereafter, but most will fairly quickly learn to confine their victimizing activities to those that run minimal risks of detection and/or punishment. Theoretically, the rate at which the probability of offending will decline in young adolescents largely depends on the learning and planning abilities of each individual. To account for the fact that a substantial minority of crimes are committed by women, ENA theory asserts that some females are exposed to fairly high levels of androgens during the perinatal stage of brain development. There is currently no evidence to either support or refute this hypothesis, although two studies have indicated that female offenders have higher than normal (for females) circulating levels of testosterone following puberty (Dabbs et al., 1987; Banks and Dabbs, 1996). Frontal Lobe Functioning ENA theory leads one to hypothesize that disruptions in the functioning of the frontal regions and/or its ability to monitor and regulate emotional input from the limbic system will be associated with increased rates of criminal behavior. Consistent with this hypothesis, research has indicated that criminal/antisocial behavior is positively correlated with damage to the frontal lobes (Damasio et al., 1994). In addition, a recent MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan revealed that men diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder and a history of impulsive aggression had 11 percent less gray matter in their prefrontal regions than was true for men in general (Raine et al., 2000). Two studies using MRI scans have compared frontal lobe functioning at different ages (Giedd et al., 1999; Sowell et al., 1999). Both studies indicated that executive control centers still exhibit “immature” functioning patterns until most individuals reach early adulthood. The difficulty many adolescents have in maintaining “self-control” could be at least partly the result of the typical immaturity of their frontal lobes. Attention Deficits and Hyperactivity ENA theory asserts that because their brains are exposed to relatively high testosterone levels, people who engage in criminal behavior tend to be neurologically under aroused. This under arousal should manifest itself partly through inattentiveness in and bored with school (Ellis, 1987).

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As a consequence of this inattention and boredom, offenders should exhibit symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorders (ADHD), and gravitate toward experimenting with drugs and other types of exciting and risky activities. The evidence bearing on these predictions is largely supportive in all cases (Ellis and Walsh, 2000: 236). Learning Ability According to the ENA theory, individuals who have difficulty learning, especially in the case of language, will be more likely to violate criminal laws than those who learn language quickly. This prediction follows from noting that while testosterone appears to promote overt competitiveness, the knowledge of how to compete in ways that do not elicit retaliation must be learned. Theoretically, the main reason testosterone tends to retard the learning of language is due to its causing a rightward shift in neocortical functioning. This reasoning predicts that low intelligence and particularly poor school performance early in life when learning and attending to language are of paramount importance will be associated with involvement in criminal/ antisocial behavior. Consistent with these predictions, research has shown that criminal/antisocial behavior is more common among persons with relatively low IQs (Wentzel, 1993: 360; Werner and Smith, 1992: 104; Lynam et al., 1993; Arnett et al., 1997: 1424) and even more so for those who perform poorly in school (Williams and McGee, 1994; Rowe, 1997: 150; Vazsonyi and Flannery, 1997). As ENA theory predicts, IQ deficits among offenders are most noticeable with regard to language skills (Farrington, 1993b: 15; Maguin et al., 1993; Stattin and Klockenberg-Larsson, 1993; Richter et al., 1996: 338), and their progress in school is slowest in the development of reading skills (Jonsson, 1975: 184; Meltzer et al., 1984; Moffitt et al., 1994). Hypotheses Pertaining to the Criminal Justice System Hypotheses derived from ENA theory bearing on the functioning of the criminal justice system are of four types. One type has to do with the issue of determinism versus free will. A second is concerned with the use of prescription drugs to reduce the risk of offending. Third, hypotheses regarding the effectiveness of solely learning-based treatment approaches are examined. Fourth, improvements in DNA technology are considered within the framework of ENA theory. In addition, I argue that to the extent ENA and other biosocial theories of criminal behavior are true, data now being collected by the criminal justice system may eventually be used to identify actual genes contributing to criminal and antisocial behavior.


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Determinism vs. Free Will ENA theory is deterministic, and therefore assumes that criminal behavior is the result of naturalist (including social) forces, not “free will.” The determinist assumption is often thought of as contrary to the legal/commonsense assumption that people must be held accountable for their actions (Uelmen and Haddox, 1974: 284; Jeffery, 1977: 297; Masters and Roberson, 1990: 103). As do others ( Jones, 1994: 273), I believe that the legal/commonsense assumption of people “freely” choosing how to behave can be interpreted within the determinist assumption without practical contradiction. My proposal involves thinking of human actions as being controlled by an interplay of the brain’s neocortex and its subcortical regions. For most people, the neocortex, particularly the frontal region, is able to restrain and temper the emotional impulses coming from subcortical regions. In neurological terms, this restraint is what is meant by “self-control.” The legal system helps to ensure that people exercise their self-control to the maximum degree by threatening to punish those who do otherwise. Consequently, while in the most literal sense the assumption of “free will” is inconsistent with a deterministic assumption, ENA theory is compatible with the view that for practical purposes it is essential to hold people responsible for their behavior, especially with regard to avoiding harm to others. If the legal nomenclature underlying criminal law were translated into deterministic terminology, it could be summarized as follows: By personal responsibility, we mean that the neocortical regions of our brains (especially the frontal lobes) must restrict our efforts to satisfy basic desires and drives (which emanate mainly from the subcortical regions of our brains) to means that minimally harm others. Otherwise, the criminal justice system assumes the right to restrict our “free will” for us! In this assumptional framework, ENA theory leads one to expect that only when the neocortex of individuals has extraordinary difficulties regulating impulses from the subcortex will they not be criminally liable for their actions. Thus, the concept of legal insanity basically refers to an incapability in the typical functioning of the neocortex. Preventing Criminal Behavior ENA theory suggests that there should be a variety of approaches to the prevention of criminal/delinquent behavior. These approaches would include the use of drugs for alleviating neurological symptoms hypothesized to be causing such behavior. Methylphenidate For example, methylphenidate (Ritalin) has been used to treat some of the symptoms of ADHD. Theoretically, administering Ritalin

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to delinquents should reduce some of their antisocial behavior. Minimal research in regard to this approach was found and it was not supportive (Conners et al., 1971). However, other drugs that are more specific in suppressing symptoms of childhood conduct disorders—such as benzedrine sulfate and dextroamphetamine sulfate—have been found to reduce aggressive and disruptive behavior among juvenile delinquents (Korey, 1944; Eisenberg et al., 1963). Anti-Androgens Theoretically, any drug that reduces postpubertal testosterone levels should help to reduce the probability of offending. This implies that a class of drugs called anti-androgens (primarily cyproterone acetate and Depro-provera) should reduce the incidence of delinquency, particularly among males who were hyperactive and conduct disorders in childhood. Societal norms will likely resist such pharmacological approaches to crime prevention even if they are found to be effective, but exploratory research on this possibility is warranted. Anti-androgens are discussed in more detail later with reference to treatment, where greater research is available. Enforcing Recreational Drug Laws Another aspect of law enforcement’s efforts to confront crime has been to criminalize the use of various recreational (nontherapeutic) drugs (such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin), and to restrict access to other recreational drugs (such as alcohol and tobacco). There are both pros and cons of dealing with crime by criminalizing and otherwise restricting access to these recreational drugs. As the suboptimal arousal element of ENA theory leads one to hypothesize, significant positive correlations have been well-established between the use of all of these drugs (including alcohol and tobacco) and involvement in victimizing forms of criminal behavior (Ellis and Walsh, 2000: 224–226). This means that untold numbers of victimful crimes are likely to have been prevented by incarcerating people for drug violations. On the other hand, many people whose intelligence and planning abilities ensure that they have very low probabilities of ever engaging in any serious forms of victimful offenses end up being ensnared by the criminal justice system as a result of arrests linked to the enforcement of drug laws. Reflecting this conundrum, a recent review of the literature on the relationship between social status and involvement in criminal behavior demonstrated that while crime in general was negatively correlated with all forms of social status, the opposite pattern was found for self-reported drug offending and parental social status (Ellis and MacDonald, 2001).


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Treating Criminal/Antisocial Behavior ENA theory has many implications for the treatment of criminal/antisocial behavior. It implies that those who find it difficult to maintain law-abiding behavior in spite of legal sanctions could benefit from drugs that address functional aspects of the brain. Three such drug-based treatment approaches are discussed in the following. Anti-Androgens Thus far, the only documented use of anti-androgens in dealing with criminal/antisocial behavior has been for treating sex offenders. The evidence has been very encouraging with respect to the effectiveness of such treatment in preventing subsequent sex offenses (reviewed by Thiessen, 1990; Icenogle, 1994; Kravitz et al., 1996). Nonetheless, as with any pharmacological treatment, the drug must be taken regularly, and is still not without side effects. To my knowledge, no study has attempted to treat offenders in general with anti-androgens, but provided dosages are regularly administered, these drugs may benefit many parolees and probationers. I would recommend that experiments with the use of anti-androgens be undertaken in the treatment for clergy involved in child molestations. While many celibate priests may wish to (and be able to) control sexual urges without drugs, it is apparent that substantial numbers are not being successful, and many children’s lives have been damaged as a result (Smith, 2002). ENA theory suggests that anti-androgen therapy (or actual castration) should prevent large proportions of child molestation by those whose professions require celibacy. Clinicians and patients in the future should be no more hesitant to use anti-androgens than they are of antidepressants or other forms of anti-psychotic medications. Antidepressants ENA theory implies that antidepressants, particularly those serving to facilitate serotonergic functioning in the limbic-frontal region should reduce criminal/antisocial behavior, especially that of an impulsive nature. Whether any such serotonin-enhancing effect will be sufficiently reliable to warrant release of habitual offenders is doubtful. Anti-Convulsants A significant cause of criminal offenses, according to ENA theory, is brain seizuring. Particularly important in this regard are subcortical regions that help to control basic drives and emotions. If this line of reasoning is correct, one should be able to treat impulsive types of criminal behavior with anti-convulsant drugs. Several studies have indicated that two anti-convulsants—Propanolol (Johnson, 1984; Sheard, 1984; Mattes, 1990) and Valproate (Deltito, 1993; Wilcox, 1995; Donovan et al., 1997)—can be effective in reducing violent outbursts among convicted offenders.

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Learning-based Approaches to Prevention and Treatment ENA theory envisions criminal behavior as largely learned although it stipulates that the underlying motivation for such behavior is primarily unlearned. If so, strictly learning/social environmental approaches to crime prevention and treatment should have beneficial effects, especially for individuals who are only minimally motivated to engage in competitive/victimizing behavior. The types of social learning programs that should have favorable preventive and treatment effects would be ones that emphasize understanding the nature and logic behind setting legal limits on behavior. This understanding is rooted in the proper comprehension and use of language. Thus, while general intelligence should be conducive to law-abiding behavior, language skills should be most crucial. Such reasoning is consistent with evidence that grades in school better predict law abiding behavior than is the case for IQ test scores (Ellis and Walsh, 2000: 232). To the extent that language training program succeed in eliminating gender, race/ethnicity, and social status variations in language skills, they should also diminish how these demographic groups differ in offending later in life. Nevertheless, because of presumed differences in underlying neurology, improved training techniques still may have difficulty equalizing both individuals and groups with respect to language skills. Another learning-based approach to prevention involves programs designed to promote self-control (Strayhorn, 2002a,b). In criminology, these programs may be thought of in connection with Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990) self-control theory, but they also can be conceptualized from the perspective of ENA theory by thinking neurologically. In particular, difficulties with executive control functions in the frontal lobes often seems to underlie one’s ability to weigh options and exercise self-control and delayed gratification in reasonable ways (Bechara et al., 1994; Metcalfe and Mischel, 1999). Even though genetic and perinatal factors have major effects on executive functioning, there is every reason to assume that appropriate training can have substantial effects as well (Baumeister et al., 1994; Strayhorn, 2002a). In this regard, a clinical consortium was able to reduce hyperactive/impulsive behavior in ADHD children by an entire standard deviation using conditioning-based intervention program (Medical Treatment Advisory Cooperative Group, 1999). Similarly, clinical psychologists were able to teach mothers how to guide their preschoolers toward improved strategies for resisting temptation and impulsive misbehavior (Mauro and Harris, 2000). Along somewhat different lines, Gerald Patterson (1996) and associates have developed reinforcement techniques that seem to be fairly effective in teaching socially responsible behavior to conduct-disordered children,


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thereby avoiding antisocial behavior in adolescence and adulthood (reviewed by McMahon and Wells, 1998). Three decades ago, a study indicated that prisoners can be taught through modeling to use delayed gratification strategies that they continued to use a month or so beyond the training session (Stumphauzer, 1972). Experimental trials need to be undertaken to determine whether more intensive training along these lines can reduce recidivism among convicted offenders. DNA Fingerprinting As more and more is learned about genetics, new opportunities to reduce criminal behavior should present itself. ENA theory would be consistent with at least two possibilities in this regard. First, as the ability of the criminal justice system to detect and solve crimes improves, it should be possible to prevent increasing proportions of serious offenses by ensuring that those who are guilty are imprisoned. This should have short-term effects for reducing risks to a community, as well as long-term effects in the sense of reducing the opportunities that offenders have to pass their genes on to future generations. While this latter point has obvious eugenics implications, it could be unavoidable and very beneficial. Even more intriguing developments may be anticipated as more and more progress is made in decoding the human genome. Eventually, it should be possible to analyze DNA data banks on offenders now being compiled to identify specific genes that are more prevalent among offenders than among persons in the populations from which they originated. This would make it possible to begin fundamentally understanding how genes contribute to criminal behavior. Summary and Discussion As its name implies, ENA theory has two major elements (or planks). The evolutionary plank focuses on explaining why criminal behavior exists in all societies (although to varying degrees), and is always most prevalent among males during the second and third decades of life. The neuroandrogenic plank is mainly concerned with explaining how the brain first motivates individuals to engage in criminal behavior around the onset of puberty, and then gradually tends to inhibit such behavior as individuals enter full adulthood. The Evolutionary Plank Regarding evolution, ENA theory contends that males have evolved behavior patterns that complement their approach to reproduction. Theoretically,

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the male approach to reproduction is more risk-intensive and relies more heavily than the female approach on competitive/victimizing behavior. ENA theory attributes this approach to female mate choice, whereby females have evolved tendencies to prefer males who are competent resource provisioners. This preference means that males who have contributed the greatest number of genes to subsequent generations have been those who are relatively capable at securing and retaining resources. The means for succeeding at resource provisioning often include competitive and victimizing behavior. The Neuroandrogenic Plank From a neuroandrogenic standpoint, ENA theory has two components. One component focuses on how male sex hormones influence brain functioning, thereby affecting the probability of competitive/victimizing behavior. Theoretically, testosterone and other androgens act on the brain in ways that increase competitive/victimizing behavior. Genes affecting the levels of androgens and responses to androgens by the brain are hypothesized to contribute to competitive/victimizing behavior, including that which is criminal. The second component of the neurohormonal plank of ENA theory is concerned with inhibiting criminal/antisocial forms of competitive/victimizing behavior. Persons with high intelligence and frontal lobes with efficient executive control are hypothesized to quickly learn how to express their competitive/victimizing tendencies in ways that minimally elicit retaliation by others (or the criminal justice system on their behalf ). On the other hand, persons with difficulties learning, especially language-based learning, and/or poor executive control will find great difficulty expressing their competitive/victimizing tendencies in socially acceptable ways. Theoretically, these individuals constitute the bulk of persistent offenders. ENA theory is summarized in figure 7.3. This flowchart shows genes and prenatal factors influencing two sets of neurological factors. One set tends to promote the probability of offending following the onset of puberty, while the other set tends to inhibit such behavior. Theoretically, cognitive, learning, and emotional factors serve as intermediary variables between brain functioning and behavior. According to ENA theory, not only do these two sets of neurological factors affect the probability of criminal behavior, but they also affect a variety of other behavioral tendencies, including drug use and sensation seeking, ADHD symptoms, and even school and work performance. Several hypotheses were derived from the theory, including those relevant to the functioning of the criminal justice system. Among the proposals was that the criminal justice system may incorporate prescription drugs in the treatment of increasing proportions of offenders, and possibly even in the prevention of crime.

Genetic and prenatal factors

Neurological factors

Seizuring susceptibility in and around the limbic system

Genes and prenatal environments that promote high testosterone regimens

Suboptimal arousal tendencies

Rightward shift in hemispheric functioning

Cognitive/learning/emotional factors

Behavioral factors

Epilepsy and other seizure disorders Emotional volatility

Sensitivity to pain Susceptibility to boredom

Attending to linguistic stimuli

ADHD symptoms Childhood school performance

Recreational drug use, excitement seeking, and recklessness

Prosocial emotions Victimizing criminal behavior

Genes and prenatal environments that promote brain development, especially of the neocortex

Enlargement and efficient functioning of the neocortex

Enlargement and efficient functioning of the prefrontal area of the frontal lobes

Intelligence and absence of learning disabilities

Efficient executive control functioning Efficient monitoring and regulation of the limbic system by frontal lobes

School performance and reliable work performance throughout life Long-term planning and coordination of activities around specific goals

Figure 7.3 A graph representing the main elements of the neurological plank in the ENA theory of criminal/antisocial behavior

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CHAPTER 8

Evolution and Political Marketing Gad Saad

Introduction

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everal prominent scholars have recently called for the unification of otherwise disparate fields under one common umbrella, namely the allencompassing Darwinian framework. Wilson (1998) proposed that all human pursuits and areas of knowledge (e.g., the sciences, the arts, religion) can be fully understood only when viewed as arising from a small set of Darwinian principles. Tooby and Cosmides (1992) have argued for a similar integration across all branches of social sciences and more specifically within the cognate discipline of psychology. Saad and Gill (2000) recently proposed that marketing, as an academic discipline, would greatly benefit from an infusion of evolutionary thinking within its theoretical bases. The current chapter takes this integrative exercise one step further in specificity; namely, it links the most recent of all of the Darwinian frameworks (evolutionary psychology) to a subbranch of marketing (namely political marketing). I shall restrict my discussion to one particular area of political marketing, namely voters’ information search and information processing activities. Specifically, I will argue that the processes by which voters decide which candidate information to evaluate, how much candidate information to acquire, and which cognitive mechanisms to use to process the available information, can all be best explained via evolutionary psychology. In the ensuing section, I begin with a brief description of the evolutionary psychology framework followed by a summary of how I have previously proposed that it can be applied to consumer marketing.

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Evolutionary Psychology and Consumer Marketing To understand the field of evolutionary psychology (EP) is to comprehend the difference between proximate and ultimate explanations. I shall describe this fundamental epistemological distinction via an example. Men, much more so than women, are very unforgiving of cuckoldry. The dissolution of a marriage is much more likely to occur if a wife cheats on her husband than vice versa. The most common cause of homicides within the family unit is when a man kills his wife because he either suspects or knows that he has been cuckolded (Daly and Wilson, 1988). One proximate explanation is that this is due to men’s greater proclivity for territorial defense and dominance. Yet another is that it is due to men’s fragile sexual egos and the corresponding sexual insecurities that arise once a wife has cheated on her husband. While the latter explanations might be veridical, it does not address why is it that men have evolved a greater sense of sexual territoriality and sexual jealousy? The ultimate explanations as to why men abhor cuckoldry more so than women is due to paternity uncertainty. Homo sapiens did not evolve with the tools of paternity DNA testing at their disposal. Hence, men evolved behaviors (e.g., abandoning a cheating wife), cognitions (e.g., disliking promiscuous women as long-term partners), and emotions (e.g., intense sexual jealousy) as adaptations to the genetic threats inherent to paternity uncertainty. Most social scientists conduct their research at the proximate level using the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) as their guiding framework (see Tooby and Cosmides, 1992, for a full discussion of the model). One of the crucial assumptions of the SSSM, which has had a pernicious effect on twentieth-century American psychology, is that cognitive processes occur via general-purpose, content-independent algorithms (e.g., behaviorism). In the exact same manner that proponents of the SSSM incorrectly presume that culture exists as a priori reality, they equally assume that humans are mystically bestowed with these general-purpose and content-independent algorithms. Proponents of the SSSM never question the genesis of one’s culture, the universality of many so-called cultural phenomena, and the evolutionary roots of our cognitive architecture. On the other hand, EP posits that the mind is comprised of domain-specific modules that have evolved to solve adaptive problems (e.g., finding a mate) and that cultures develop in line with evolutionary goals. Marketing scholars, having typically been trained in the cognate disciplines within the social sciences, have historically fully embraced the SSSM and its central tenets. A retailing scholar investigating the link between the pace of music in a retail store and a consumer’s pace of browsing will typically use Pavlovian conditioning to explain the process. A consumer

Evolution and Political Marketing

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psychologist exploring the efficacy of loyalty programs (e.g., frequent flyer miles) will apply Skinnerian conditioning as the relevant theoretical framework. Both forms of conditioning represent examples of general-purpose and content-independent algorithms. Because the marketing discipline is constrained and blinded by its epistemological underpinnings, it merely operates at the proximate level. This has yielded an accumulated body of knowledge across the subfields of marketing (e.g., advertising, consumer behavior, retailing) that suffers from a lack of cohesiveness precisely because no organizing framework exists that runs through all of its branches. Proximate and ultimate explanations do not compete in a zero-sum game rather they address issues at fundamentally different levels. As long as marketing scholars continue to ignore the Darwinian roots of our behavior, they will fail in their ability to fully explain the panoply of market-related behaviors of the typical consumer. Saad and Gill (2000) conducted a content analysis of seven academic databases to gauge the ubiquity of Darwinian-based work over the past thirty years. They found a marked increase in the acceptance of Darwinian-based work across many disciplines. Surprisingly, business scholars have been rather reticent in adopting the Darwinian framework. The same authors have elsewhere performed a detailed coding of authors’ departmental affiliations for those authors that had published in Evolution and Human Behavior (formerly titled Ethology and Sociobiology), the journal that has traditionally been the primary outlet for EP-based work. A negligible number of authors emanating from either the business disciplines or from political science has ever published in the journal. Thus, it would appear that there exists a need to better inform both marketing and political science scholars of the viability of using EP within their respective fields. Needless to say, the explicit link between EP and political marketing has yet to be made, hence the value of the current chapter in drawing attention to the viability of using the former framework in the latter domain of marketing. Having established the dearth of EP-based approaches in the marketing literature, Saad and Gill (2000) subsequently proposed three distinct manners by which the marketing discipline could benefit from an infusion of Darwinianbased theorizing. First, it could offer ultimate explanations of previously published findings, as opposed to the ubiquitous proximate-level theorizing that currently exists in the field. For example, several consumer researchers have found that sexual stimuli in advertisements are more efficacious on men than they are on women (cf. LaTour, 1990). This robust finding has typically been explained via socialization-based theorizing (e.g., men are taught to openly express their sexuality whereas women are restrained from doing so). Numerous evolutionary psychologists have since proposed Darwinian-based

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rationales as to why men react more favorably to sexual stimuli (cf. Symons, 1979; Buss, 1994). Second, EP can be used to explain the pervasive sex differences that exist when it comes to the consumption of specific products (e.g., the cosmetics industry is predominantly geared toward women). Once again, theories that have traditionally explored these sex differences in aggregate consumption patterns have all proposed variants of the same standard and generic socialization-based theorizing espoused by proponents of the SSSM. Evolutionary psychology, on the other hand, provides ultimate Darwinian-based reasons for these persistent sex differences. Men desire young and attractive women (reliable cues for fertility). Women are well aware of men’s evolved preferences and accordingly engage in behaviors that will enhance their physical attractiveness, hence their greater consumption of cosmetics. A third manner by which EP can be applied in marketing is that it can allow researchers to posit hypotheses and develop lines of inquiry that would otherwise have been impossible to posit, had one not adopted a Darwinian outlook. Wright (1995) reviews several studies showing that women frequenting a singles bar will wear more provocative attire and greater make-up and jewelry, when close to ovulation. The Darwinian explanation is blatantly simple here: women will “advertise” themselves to a greater extent when they are maximally fertile. Our innate predispositions guide our behavior irrespective of whether we are blissfully unaware of them. Clearly, this line of inquiry (i.e., linking a physiological measure to overt behavior) would have never been pursued had researchers remained within the confines of the SSSM. In the preceding discussion, I have specifically chosen examples that relate to sex-based differences for these are very palpable, especially to readers unfamiliar with the EP framework. However, EP’s influence in explaining behavior extends far beyond mere sex differences (see Saad and Gill, 2000, for a fuller discussion of EP’s influence both within and outside the consumption setting). Voters’ Information Search and Processing in Political Marketing Consumers and voters alike search for and process information; they form and develop beliefs and attitudes; they apply decision rules. Scholars within the political marketing sphere who have explored voters’ information search and information processing, have arrived at the same conclusion as those working from within my own behavioral decision-making research stream: individuals are cognitive misers. Kotler and Kotler (1999) state the following: “Voters rarely get to know candidates. Most lack the time or interest to explore their political choices. They generally vote on the basis of the candidates’ images as


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shaped by the media or previous identifications” (14). The authors add that there is an increasing focus from voters on single issues. By focusing on single issues, this in a sense further simplifies voters’ choice environments. Along the lines of the single-issue campaign, Maarek (1995: 46) argues that a successful campaign should have a Unique Selling Proposition. This is undoubtedly so because voters are unlikely and/or unwilling to dedicate the necessary cognitive resources to evaluate a multi-thematic campaign. Popkin (1991) proposed that voters utilize informational shortcuts when choosing a candidate, for example, relying on the opinion of others. Schur (1999) claims that “So, engaging the attention of the electorate, and maintaining that attention long enough to teach voters something about the candidates, is an extraordinarily difficult and resource-consuming process” (143). Finally, consistently poor voter turnouts in various democratic elections, lends further credence to voter apathy and minimal involvement. Hence, given the fact that voters do not look at all of the relevant and available information prior to choosing a candidate, how do they choose which candidate information to process? When have they acquired a sufficient amount of information to commit to a winning candidate? Which types of decision rules and/or heuristics do they use in evaluating the competing candidates? I propose that the manner by which voters choose which candidate information to process, decide how much information to process, and finally establish how to choose a winning candidate, are indeed Darwinian-based processes. Which Candidate Information do Voters Process? Plasser et al. (1999) report findings from the European Consultants Survey demonstrating the importance of a candidate’s image in winning an election. As a matter of fact, a candidate’s image was consistently ranked as more important than his/her position on key issues. This is perfectly congruent with the fact that voters are cognitive misers that make use of shortcuts in forming their opinions of the competing candidates. In the current context, these shortcuts might entail relying on attributes that are easy to gauge (e.g., visual and vocal cues). I propose that a Darwinian module is responsible for determining the cues used in the evaluative process. What are some visual cues that are easily discernible by the electorate? Eighty-three percent of past winners in the U.S. presidential race (1904–1996) were taller than their losing counterparts (Pinker, 1997: 495–496). Similarly, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, of which a great majority are men, are taller than average. Numerous EP-based studies have shown that height is a physical characteristic that is highly sought by women. This is so because height

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serves as a proxy cue for dominance, a trait that is desired in hierarchical species such as Homo sapiens. Another obvious characteristic that can easily be gauged is a candidate’s health. Both men and women have evolved the ability to detect cues that correlate with health, which in turn serves as a proxy measure of fertility, genetic fitness, and vigor. One such cue is physical attractiveness (e.g., facial symmetry). Schubert and Curran (2001) explored the effects of four facial characteristics, namely attractiveness, healthiness, neoteny (possessing infant-like features), and dominance, on a political candidate’s likelihood of being elected. One of their key findings was that facial dominance had a significant effect on a candidate’s electoral success. Several evolutionists have demonstrated our innate preferences for symmetric faces and bodies. The literature on physical attractiveness as originating from social psychology has consistently found that there are great benefits to being attractive. There are advantageous outcomes of being attractive even within the “rational” realm of economics. The phenomenon is so pervasive that it has been coined the “what-is-beautiful-is-good” effect (Eagly et al., 1991). Hearing that a candidate does not look presidential should explicitly be translated to his either being too short or too unattractive! Ross Perot, Paul Tsongas, and Michael Dukakis might owe part of their respective defeats either to their “lacking” heights and/or their below-than-average looks. Incidentally, this should not be construed as my condoning genetic determinism. I happen to be shorter than the average American male. This does not mean that I am deterministically doomed to a life of rejection by women and employers! Rather, I can utilize other qualities to ascend the social hierarchy. Humans have evolved preferences that are in line with their adaptive goals. Hence, to the extent that height and physical attractiveness are reliable correlates of dominance and vigor, it would make evolutionary sense that we would use of such cues in judging others. Are there specific personality traits that the electorate seeks in its elected officials? Some of the skills necessary to be a good poker player, an effective negotiator in a Middle Eastern souk, or a smart consumer at a car dealership in the United States, are equally required of our politicians. Might the electorate in the political arena be unimpressed with exceeding levels of integrity, honesty, and scrupulosity? As is the case with many personality traits, I propose that the “optimal” level for the “honesty” trait might be best described via an inverted-U pattern. The electorate might disapprove of a political candidate who is perceived as either too dishonest or too honest. The Darwinian explanation that has been proposed to explain Homo sapiens’ innate preference for “less-than-perfect” standards of ethics and integrity fits within the rubric of the Machiavellian hypothesis (cf. Byrne and Whiten, 1988;


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Whiten and Byrne, 1997). The latter hypothesis posits that the evolution of intelligence in Homo sapiens was due to selection pressures favoring those social skills needed to “optimally” navigate in an environment of increasing social complexity. One set of such mandatory social skills would be the ability to deceive, coerce, and manipulate one’s cohorts to one’s advantage. Hence, to ascend the dominance hierarchies inherent in human societies, one must possess high Machiavellian intelligence. Accordingly, it would not be surprising that voters would prefer candidates who score high on this measure. I suppose that the “bad boy” syndrome and the “good guys finish last” adage are manifestations of such preferences. Having said that, how difficult is it to gauge such a quality? After all, it is rather trivial for a voter to gauge a candidate’s height or facial characteristics. However, how does one identify Machiavellian intelligence? I propose that we cannot specifically gauge this quality, rather we form a Gestalt opinion of a candidate based on both verbal and nonverbal cues that the candidate transmits to us. The more Machiavellian the politician is, the greater the connection between him and the electorate, be it in terms of believability, trustworthiness, or mere charisma. A Machiavellian politician will convince us that he shares in our plights and empathizes with our struggles. Machiavelli states: “For a prince . . . it is not necessary to have all the [virtuous] qualities, but it is very necessary to appear to have them” (as cited by Byrne and Whiten, 1997: 13). Building a political candidate’s image is after all about creating perceptions that are oftentimes removed from any objective reality. To draw an analogy with consumer marketing, most consumer products are highly undifferentiated in terms of their utilitarian value. The goal of marketers is to create differentiation via the building of brand equity. All other things equal, a Machiavellian candidate will prove to be a highly effective self-promoter, adept at building brand equity for his candidacy. For a recent treatise of the application of Machiavellian principles in marketing, management, and political management, see Harris et al. (2000). If natural selection has selected for Machiavellian intelligence, it must have also selected for cognitive and affective mechanisms that can counteract, or at the very least, detect such deceit. In other words, Machiavellian intelligence should be a bidirectional process, comprised both of skills that attempt to deceive and manipulate one’s cohorts while at the same time detecting such attempts when targeted at us. Is there any evidence that suggests that we have such “defensive” capabilities? Cosmides and Tooby (1992) have shown that individuals have an innate cheater detection module. In other words, people are grossly adept at detecting cheating in social contracts. For example, a broken promise made during a political campaign might constitute such a violation. Oliver Saks, the renowned neurologist, describes a case entitled

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“The President’s Speech” (Saks, 1990: 80–84) whereby a group of patients suffering from aphasia (loss of the ability to understanding the semantic meaning of spoken words), were nonetheless found laughing hysterically while watching a presidential speech. The patients were highly attuned to auditory tones, allowing them to fully detect the dishonesty of a political speech, to the point of finding it laughable. This suggests that our “defensive” mechanisms might be both multimodal and multilayered. In other words, we are likely to have evolved a slew of sensory systems for detecting dishonest and Machiavellian intent. In the same manner that persons who have lost their sight compensate by developing a superior sense of touch and/or smell, the patients in question were using the “tonality” module for detecting dishonesty when other sensorial or cognitive systems had failed them. Non-afflicted individuals are not as attuned to such auditory tones precisely because other input systems dominate their processing (e.g., visual cues such as the nonverbal signals and facial expressions studied both by Roger Masters in biopolitics and Paul Ekman in psychology). Saks also describes a case of a patient suffering from tonal agnosia (i.e., the inability to detect tonality in spoken speech). The patient had to focus on the exactitude of the spoken words and nonverbal cues (both of body and face) to compensate for her agnosia. Upon hearing the president’s speech, she concluded that he was either brain damaged or was trying to conceal something. In a powerful concluding passage, Saks states “We normals-aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled . . . And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived” (84). Evolutionary psychology can not only explain which information will be deemed important when the electorate is evaluating candidates but also it can address why some candidate information is unimportant. For example, why does the electorate not care much about the extramarital dalliances of presidents? Bill Clinton maintained high approval ratings despite his extramarital dalliances. During Clinton’s presidential trip to Africa, one of the African leaders was surprised by the controversy that the Lewinsky episode was generating. The African leader argued that the more important a chief, the more women he should have access to. Accordingly, given that Clinton was the most powerful of all chiefs, he could not understand what the fuss was all about. President Kennedy was notorious for his extramarital dalliances while President Coolidge has a phenomenon named after him in the human mating literature. The “Coolidge effect” refers to the phenomenon whereby otherwise sexually exhausted males can be enticed to mate yet again as long as it is with females that they have yet to mate with. Countless European politicians have


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quite openly had mistresses (e.g., François Mitterand) without it ever affecting their approval ratings. Hence, it would appear that of all possible violations of social mores, extramarital dalliances do not carry deleterious effects from the candidate’s perspective. There exists one clear instance when the sexual indiscretions of a political candidate would indeed be severely harmful to their image. Evolutionary psychology would predict that if the candidate were a woman, the repercussions might indeed be disastrous. This differential attitude toward sexual dalliances is not due to mysterious socialization forces. Instead, they are the result of clear Darwinian forces related to the evolution of human sexuality (cf. Symons, 1979; Buss, 1994). To summarize this section, I have argued that voters make use of easily accessible cues in forming their opinions of political candidates. Darwinian forces shape the choice of the particular cues used in arriving at such judgments. All other things equal, being tall, attractive, dominant, and Machiavellian will improve one’s chances of winning an election. Finally, while not condoning adultery, I have provided a Darwinian-based explanation as to why the electorate is generally permissive of such dalliances when it comes to male candidates and why they might be less forgiven if it were a female candidate that engaged in such activities. The Contender, a recent American movie, makes precisely the latter point in a poignant and dramatic manner. Adaptive Use of Decision Rules A robust finding to originate from the behavioral decision theory literature has been that decision-makers are adaptive in the manner in which they apply decision rules. Hence, contrary to classical economic theory, which assumes rigid and inflexible processes (e.g., utility maximization), individuals adapt their behaviors as a function of the environmental cues that they encounter during a given decision. Suppose that a voter must choose between four political candidates, each defined by four attributes as shown in the informational display board in table 8.1. There are many possible decision rules that the voter can apply in arriving at a final choice. The normative rule, as postulated by standard economic theory, would require that the voter holistically evaluate each alternative by multiplying the weight of each attribute by its corresponding attribute value, and summing these products for all four attributes. Subsequently, the voter would choose the candidate that yielded the highest aggregate score. Referring back to table 8.1, if the latter normative rule were applied, Candidate C would be chosen here. Clearly, while in principle this is a thorough and accurate decision rule to use, it ignores the fact that decision-makers face cognitive and time constraints that

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Table 8.1 Informational display board consisting of four political candidates defined on four attributes Perceived trustworthiness (0.50)

Political experience (0.30)

Oratory skills (0.15)

Conservatism of political ideas (0.05)

Candidate A Candidate B Candidate C Candidate D

7 2 6 6

5 7 7 1

5 7 6 4

4 7 4 3

Cutoffs

6

5

4

4

Notes (1) The attribute values are represented on a 1–7 scale where 1 corresponds to “least” and 7 to “most.” (2) The attribute weights, as defined by a given hypothetical voter, are represented in parentheses. (3) If an attribute value is greater than or equal to its respective cutoff, it passes it. The voter establishes the cutoffs.

will typically dissuade them from engaging in such a rigorous process. Also, as previously mentioned, voters are cognitive misers that typically use simple and fast processes in arriving at a final choice. Behavioral decision theorists have indeed uncovered numerous “simpler” decision rules that decisionmakers use in arriving at a final choice (see Payne et al., 1993, for an exhaustive discussion of these rules). I shall briefly review a small subset of these rules here. The Lexicographic Rule proposes that the alternative that scores the highest on the most important attribute (“perceived trustworthiness” in table 8.1) be chosen. In this case, Candidate A would be chosen. The Majority of Confirming Dimensions Rule stipulates that a decision-maker will choose the alternative that is superior on the greatest number of attributes, resulting in Candidate B being chosen. The Disjunctive Rule proposes that the first alternative that meets a single cutoff wins. In this case, since all four alternatives do pass on at least one cutoff each, the winner would be the one that is first to be evaluated. Finally, the Conjunctive Rule states that all alternatives that pass all four cutoffs are retained. Hence, in the current example, both candidates A and C would be retained. One would then have to use a tiebreaking decision rule (e.g., the Lexicographic Rule) to choose a final winner. How does one choose which of the myriad of decision rules he/she will use in arriving at a final choice? Payne et al. (1993) have demonstrated that, when choosing which heuristic to use in a given context, individuals weigh the cognitive effort of using a decision rule against its accuracy (as compared


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to that achieved via the use of the normative rule). They further proposed that the cognitive cost–accuracy tradeoff would be affected by numerous factors. For example, the presence of time pressure when making a decision, having to justify one’s decision to others, and being an expert in the decisional domain, are each likely to affect the cost–accuracy tradeoff. Hence, contingent on the decisional environment that they are facing, decisionmakers choose that decision rule most appropriate for that particular context. Payne et al. (1993) demonstrated that in certain instances, the decision rule that is used is constructed during the decision as opposed to chosen prior to engaging in the decision. For example, if a particular attribute is found to have minimal variance across the alternatives, it might be deleted all together from further consideration. This editing of the informational content is by definition made during the decision rather than prior to engaging in the decision. Thus, while both contingent and constructive processes are manifestations of adaptive behavior, the latter are both more “online” and data driven. Adaptive behavior makes evolutionary sense. Natural selection does not select for traits that promote nonmalleable, inflexible, and rigid behavior. If anything, plasticity of behavior is inherent to the interactionist framework, which posits that innate Darwinian modules interact with environmental cues in shaping an organism’s behavior. Thus, that decision-makers are highly adaptive in their use of decision rules conforms to a central tenet of evolutionary theory. Adaptive Use of Stopping Rules Suppose that a voter were to use the Conjunctive Rule in choosing between the four candidates of table 8.1. Recall that candidates B and D would be eliminated while candidates A and C would be retained. When such binary choices arise (e.g., in a presidential election) an alternate view of information search has been proposed. The Criterion Dependent Choice (CDC) model posits that the acquisition of new information will take place until a sufficient level of differentiation has been achieved between the competing alternatives to justify a final choice (Aschenbrenner et al., 1984; Schmalhofer et al., 1986). Upon viewing each piece of acquired attribute information, the decisionmaker calculates the subjective difference between the competing alternatives on that particular attribute. Once a preestablished threshold of cumulative differentiation is reached, the appropriate winning alternative is chosen (see the horizontal thresholds in figure 8.1). The horizontal thresholds of the CDC model imply that decision-makers are inflexible and rigid. Irrespective of how the information search process

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K Candidate A Cumulative 0.50 confidence

Number of attributes acquired

Candidate B K

Figure 8.1 The Criterion Dependent Choice Model (horizontal thresholds) and the Discrimination Framework (concave thresholds)

unravels, a constant threshold of differentiation is required across the full attribute space. Hence, the decision-maker is assumed to establish a priori the two horizontal thresholds and will accordingly stick to these irrespective of any environmental and/or situational cues that might require adaptive behavior. The Discrimination Framework (Saad, 1994; Saad and Russo, 1996) assumes the same cognitive process as that proposed by the CDC, with one notable exception. The thresholds are concave rather than horizontal. This is due to one of two reasons. First, the incremental cost of search may cause an individual to relax his/her threshold. Second, poor progress in terms of the cumulative differentiation achieved (i.e., the two alternatives are extremely similar to one another) would require that the thresholds be relaxed. Otherwise, even if a decision-maker were unbounded by cost constraints, he/she would nonetheless never be able to reach the horizontal thresholds given the minimal differentiation between the two competing alternatives. Hence, the Discrimination Framework specifically recognizes individuals’ propensities to manifest adaptive behavior during the information search process. During the empirical testing of the Discrimination Framework, the latter authors uncovered a new stopping heuristic, which they subsequently coined the Core Attributes (CA) heuristic. For some individuals, rather than using the cumulative differentiation achieved as their guiding mechanism, they focused on a set of core or important attributes. Once these were acquired, they chose that alternative which was ahead at that point. For example, in the context of a presidential election, a voter might solely acquire information on “political experience,” “leadership and presidential qualities,” and “position


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on domestic fiscal policies.” That candidate who is ahead once the latter three core attributes are acquired will be chosen. Note that the “leadership and presidential qualities” might partially be comprised of those cues discussed in an earlier section (i.e., height, facial characteristics, and Machiavellian intelligence). Interestingly, Saad (1994) and Saad and Russo (1996) found that despite the “rigid” nature of the CA heuristic, decision-makers do not apply it as inflexibly as might otherwise be assumed. If the cumulative differentiation achieved is so large after only a subset of the core attributes have been acquired, an individual might stop “early” and commit to the leading alternative. On the other hand, if the cumulative differentiation achieved is minimal once the full set of core attributes has been acquired, an individual might stop “late,” that is, the individual would acquire attributes past his/her core set. Hence, individuals apply the CA heuristic adaptively, by using both their set of core attributes and the achieved cumulative differentiation achieved, as guiding cues. To summarize, decision-makers use stopping policies that not only simplify their decisional environments but also that are adaptive to environmental cues. The concavity of the thresholds and the adaptive use of the CA heuristic are manifestations of such stopping policies. Thus, decision-makers display adaptive behavior both in the manner that they apply decision rules and in their use of stopping policies. As previously mentioned, adaptive behavior is congruent with the malleability of behavior that is espoused by evolutionary theory, while being in clear disaccord with classical models of rational choice. Adaptive Use of Shortcut Heuristics The decision rules discussed earlier stem from the bounded rationality paradigm as originally espoused by Herb Simon (cf. Simon, 1982). A group headed by Gerd Gigerenzer at the Max Planck Institute of Human Development has been working on a research program that has sought to expand the latter idea of rationality. Gigerenzer and Todd (1999) introduced the idea of ecological rationality and explained it as follows: “To behave adaptively in the face of environmental challenges, organisms must be able to make inferences that are fast, frugal, and accurate. These real-world requirements lead to a new conception of what proper reasoning is: ecological rationality. Fast and frugal heuristics that are matched to particular environmental structures allow organisms to be ecologically rational.” (18). The authors later add: “. . . fast and frugal heuristics can be faster, more frugal, and more accurate at the same time. No trade-off need be considered” (22).

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One such heuristic that was investigated by Goldstein and Gigerenzer (1999) is the recognition heuristic, which simply posits that one should choose that alternative which they recognize. Goldstein and Gigerenzer argue that the recognition heuristic has roots in our evolutionary past given that various forms of recognition are important to our survival (e.g., recognizing faces, voices, or foods to avoid). Hence, not only should we have a proclivity to use this heuristic, but also it should yield accurate results, that is, it should be ecologically rational to use it. They demonstrated that the use of the recognition heuristic in choosing stocks (i.e., choosing stocks of recognizable companies) led to equally profitable outcomes as compared to those of sophisticated models. Hence, an incredibly fast and frugal heuristic yielded very accurate and satisfying results. Do consumers or voters ever use the recognition heuristic? Consumers will often choose a product merely because they recognize the brand name. Similarly, they will frequently buy a product because they recognize the country in which it was manufactured as being one that has expertise in the product category. In both instances, the recognition heuristic is instrumental in arriving at a final choice. In the context of political marketing, the incumbency advantage might partly be due to voters’ use of the recognition heuristic. Ceteris paribus, the electorate votes for a familiar and recognizable entity. Behavioral decision theorists have repeatedly shown that individuals make use of shortcut heuristics that oftentimes lead to biased results (cf. Kahneman et al., 1982). However, these biases have traditionally been judged against the backdrop of economic rationality. When the benchmark of comparison is changed from economic to ecological rationality, the biases are no longer construed as such. For example, the framing effect posits that a statement framed in one of two isomorphically equivalent ways will be judged differently. Stating that a hamburger is 90 percent fat free yields different nutritional evaluations as compared to stating that it contains 10 percent fat! In the context of a political campaign, making the claim that a candidate was endorsed by 70 percent of the unions would likely yield different electoral attitudes than stating that he/she was not endorsed by the remaining 30 percent. Undoubtedly, the “negative” frame (i.e., that 30% of the unions did not endorse the candidate) would yield more negative attitudes. This fully accords with a robust finding in the political advertising literature, namely that negative advertising is highly efficacious in terms of recall. Paying greater attention to negative information makes adaptive sense. In many instances, ignoring negative information has more deleterious repercussions than doing so with position information. This is consistent with Schwarz and Clore’s (1983) “affect-as-information” heuristic, which argues that a negative


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mood (negative advertisement in the current context) would serve as a signal requiring immediate attention. Thus, succumbing to the framing effect makes ecological sense. To summarize, decision-makers make use of simple, fast, and frugal heuristics. Rather than being a manifestation of irrational behavior (in an economic sense), the use of such heuristics makes perfect evolutionary and ecological sense. In the context of the political arena, voters use a myriad of such heuristics. I described two possible examples, namely the use of the recognition heuristic and the greater focus on negative information. Conclusion and Implications for Public Policy The common theme throughout this chapter has been that voters make use of adaptive heuristics that simplify their decisional environments. Voters must decide which information to evaluate, they must determine when to stop acquiring additional information, and they must identify the decision rules or heuristics to use in arriving at a final choice. In each of the latter three stages, the cognitive processes used are well grounded in evolutionary theory. Which candidate information is acquired (the columns in table 8.1 or the x-axis in figure 8.1) is based on Darwinian-based preferences that individuals seek in their prospective leaders (e.g., cues of dominance or social intelligence). The use of contingent and constructive processes when applying decision rules is a manifestation of adaptive behavior in light of incoming environmental cues. The concavity of the thresholds and the adaptive use of the CA heuristic highlight the fact that the termination of the search process is a highly flexible and malleable process. Finally, the ecologically valid use of extremely fast and frugal heuristics (e.g., the recognition heuristic) yields accurate and satisfying outcomes without necessarily being constrained by any cost–benefit tradeoff. In light of the minimal effort expended by voters across all levels of governmental elections, the spending on campaigns is grossly suboptimal and inefficient from a societal perspective. I propose that the exponential growth in election spending is due to what Frank and Cook (1995) have coined the winner-take-all society. Winner-take-all markets offer exceptionally large rewards to the few winners of a market competition that will typically attract a substantially large number of participants. Clearly, from a macro perspective, this is an inefficient use of the society’s pool of talent and resources. However, given the allure of the obscene rewards bestowed to the winners, the participants in a winner-take-all market become engaged in a never-ending positional arms race to increase their chances of winning the competition.

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This is exactly what has taken place in American politics. The competitors are locked into an arms race that none can afford to lose. An increase in spending by one candidate is immediately matched by all others. Interestingly, winner-take-all competitions do yield advantageous outcomes in some instances. For example, that promising basketball players compete in fierce competitions to make it to the NBA increases the overall quality of the games. On the other hand, the same competition within the political arena has yielded nothing but deleterious effects. It has resulted in a substantial increase in smut reporting. It has intensified the venom with which candidates attack one another. Perhaps most importantly, it has forced politicians to “become political prostitutes, distorting their positions on policy issues or forcing them to make commitments that do not square with their sense of the public interest” (Frank and Cook, 1995: 182). Contrast this with the Canadian parliamentary system whereby campaigning is restricted to the five weeks prior to federal elections being held, resulting in greater political civility and lesser pandering. While I am admittedly not an expert on campaign reform laws, I am most certain that in light of voters’ prevalent use of fast and frugal heuristics in choosing their candidates, such laws do not go nearly far enough in redressing the inefficient use of both public and private funds. References Aschenbrenner, K. M., D. Albert, and F. Schmalhofer. (1984). Stochastic choice heuristics. Acta Psychologica 56: 153–166. Buss, D. (1994). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. New York: Basic Books. Byrne, R. W. and A. Whiten (Eds.). (1988). Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes and Humans. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Byrne, R. W. and A. Whiten. (1997). Machiavellian intelligence. In A. Whiten and R. W. Byrne (Eds.), Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cosmides, L. and J. Tooby. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby. (Eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Daly, M. and M. Wilson. (1988). Homicide. New York: A. de Gruyter. Eagly, A. H., R. D. Ashmore, M. G. Makhijani, and L. C. Longo. (1991). What is beautiful is good, but . . . : A meta-analytic review of research on the physical attractiveness stereotype. Psychological Bulletin 110: 109–128. Harris, P., A. Lock, and P. Rees. (2000). Machiavelli, Marketing and Management. London: Routledge.


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Frank, R. H. and P. J. Cook. (1995). The Winner Take-All Society. New York: Penguin Books. Gigerenzer, G. and P. M. Todd. (1999). Fast and frugal heuristics: The adaptive toolbox. In G. Gigerenzer, P. M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group (Eds.), Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart. New York: Oxford University Press. Goldstein, D. G. and G. Gigerenzer. (1999). The recognition heuristic: How ignorance makes us smart. In G. Gigerenzer, P. M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group (Eds.), Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart. New York: Oxford University Press. Kahneman, D., P. Slovic, and A. Tversky (Eds.). (1982). Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kotler, P. and N. Kotler. (1999). Political marketing: Generating effective candidates, Campaigns, and causes. In Bruce I. Newman (Ed.), Handbook of Political Marketing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. LaTour, M. S. (1990). Female nudity in print advertising: An analysis of gender differences in arousal and ad response. Psychology and Marketing 7(1): 65–81. Machiavelli, N. (1513/1961). The Prince. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, (translated from the Italian version by G. Bull). Maarek, P. J. (1995). Political Marketing and Communication. London: John Libbey & Company Ltd. Payne, J. W., J. R. Bettman, and E. J. Johnson. (1993). The Adaptive Decision Maker. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pinker, S. (1997). How the Mind Works. New York: Norton. Plasser, F., C. Scheucher, and C. Senft. (1999). Is there a European style of political marketing? A survey of political managers and consultants. In Bruce I. Newman (Ed.), Handbook of Political Marketing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Popkin, S. L. (1991). The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Saad, G. (1994). The Adaptive Use of Stopping Policies in Sequential Consumer Choice. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cornell University. Saad, G. and T. Gill. (2000). Applications of evolutionary psychology to marketing. Psychology and Marketing 17(12): 1005–1034. Saad, G. and J. E. Russo. (1996). Stopping criteria in sequential choice. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 67(3): 258–270. Saks, O. (1990). The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. New York, NY: HarperPerennial. Schmalhofer, F., A. Dietrich, K. M. Aschenbrenner, and H. Gertzen. (1986). Process traces of binary choices: Evidence for selective and adaptive decision heuristics. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 38A: 59–76. Schubert, J. and M. A. Curran. (2001). Appearance effects in political careers: Do politicians with good genes get more votes. Paper presented at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society Meetings, London, England. Schur, D. (1999). Coordinating the paid and earned media message. In Bruce I. Newman (Ed.), Handbook of Political Marketing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

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Schwarz, N. and G. L. Clore. (1983). Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45: 513–523. Simon, H. A. (1982). Models of Bounded Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Symons, D. (1979). The Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press. Tooby, J. and L. Cosmides. (1992). Psychological foundations of culture. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby (Eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, E. O. (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. London: Abacus. Whiten, A. and R. W. Byrne. (Eds.). (1997). Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, R. (1995). The Moral Animal—Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. New York: Vintage.

CHAPTER 9

Explore and Exploit: An Evolutionary Analysis of Institutional Dynamics Arthur T. Denzau and Paul J. Zak

Introduction

T

here is widespread support for the proposition that poor economic performance is fundamentally related to poor public policy (North, 1990; Mantzavinos, 2001; Easterly, 2001; Feng et al., 2000b). Oftentimes, bad policy is indeed good politics as extant institutional arrangements reward socially inefficient outcomes (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2002). That is, policy-makers respond to incentives embedded in the institutional structure when choosing policies (Zak, 2002; Ghate and Zak, 2002). If it is institutions that fundamentally result in poverty, conflict, and other sources of human suffering, why are such institutions not changed? This chapter analyzes the way organizations respond to change, particularly external environmental change. We begin with a theoretical analysis of institutional evolution. This ends with a statement of a basic strategic problem for an institution: how much should an organization invest its efforts exploring for new information, largely external to the organization, as opposed to exploiting the information it already has, internal to the organization. The theory and its implications are used to inform the applications that are then presented as analytic narratives (Bates et al., 1998). These include: policies choices made by the U.S. auto industry, U.S. trade protection in the 1970s, federalism and centralization of government, policy direction of the International Monetary Fund and the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry, legislative term limits, the impact of a new international data set on research output, and Islam as an adaptive learning system.

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A Theory of Institutional Evolution Institutions are human constructs. While each particular institution one examines can be modified in a potentially unique way, human actions are always required. Human behavior is driven by our evolved biology (Somit and Peterson, 2001). Following the arguments in Zak and Denzau (2001), modern evolutionary theory is used to ground the model of human action derived here. Our model of institutional evolution is based on the ecological theory of optimal foraging (Krebs and Stephens, 1986), incorporating several substantial extensions. Indeed, the model is one of “institutional niche seeking,” akin to the search for environmental niches well documented by biologists. We present the logic of the argument with a minimum of notation and without formal proofs, but with sufficient rigor to be clearly understood. Those who wish to skip the mathematics may see the implications of the model in the subsequent section, and applications in the third section. Indeed, though the chapter’s discussions are rigorously based on a mathematical model of institutional evolution, the applications of the model with respect to policy are self-contained and do not require the mathematics. The model is included so that readers can see that our propositions regarding the impact of institutions on policy choices are based on a solid foundation, as well as because the model itself is of independent interest. The basis for the model is the three-stage evolutionary process: (1) a number of “experiments” or trials takes place; (2) selection of the best alternative; and (3) retention of the best alternative. Absent this evolutionary process, institutions will not improve over time (although they could still change). The remaining question is how human beings apply this process. Presuming experimentation occurs, the model identifies a criterion for the selection of better institutions, and then compares this to the cost of adopting it. Thus, the model focuses on the selection and retention aspects of change; experimentation will be examined in the applications that follow the model. The Model Consider a continuum of heterogeneous individuals distributed on the positive real numbers, R⫹. The mass of individuals is unity, with a particular individual denoted by i. For example, one can consider agents varying by their labor income or wealth, producing a well-defined ordering on R⫹. Agents are presumed to have identical preferences for evaluating the consumption of goods that make them happy. “Goods” include manufactured

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items one purchases, leisure time, political objectives, and nonmarket goods such as sunsets or fresh air. Let the vector of goods consumed by agent i be ci, with preferences defined over these goods being represented by a utility function U(ci) which is continuous, increasing, and strictly concave, with costs of institutional change separable from the utility of consumption. An agent faces budget and time constraints. Given these constraints, an agent chooses the consumption bundle that maximizes his or her utility. For simplicity, we ignore intertemporal issues and uncertainty over economic fundamentals, letting U(ci) denote an agent’s lifetime utility. Note that individuals are assumed to have finite income, limited time, and can costlessly observe the price of each good. Suppose that institution ␣ is currently in place. Following North (1990), an institution is defined as a socially chosen set of rules that circumscribe how interactions occur. More simply, institutions are “rules of the game” that demarcate the set of choices one can make. Functionally, an institution impacts the composition of the consumption goods one chooses. For example, if a particular institutional structure leads a society to levy a 100 percent tax on the purchase of vehicles with internal combustion engines, then standard economic theory shows that agents will substitute away from this good, and toward, for example, a renewable fuel vehicle. Thus, institutions impact individuals’ consumption choices. Let us denote the lifetime utility from agent i’s optimal consumption choice ci* under institution ␣ as U␣(ci*). The fundamental question we seek to answer in this chapter is: under what conditions will a society change institution ␣ for a new institution ␤? To be clear: a different institution does not guarantee that a different policy will be enacted, though generically it changes the probabilities associated with the enactment among a set of policies. Because policy-makers are generally fairly constrained when setting policy (Feng et al., 2000; Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2002), herein we examine a more elemental issue than when policy will change, asking when the institutions that engender policy choices change. First consider an individual. Agent i would be willing to pay cost ␶i ⬎ 0 to change from institution ␣ to institution ␤ and optimally consume bundle ci** in this regime if EU␤(ci**) ⫺ U␣(ci*) ⬎ ⫺ U(␶i)

(1)

In words, this says that the expected change in happiness (utility) exceeds the utility loss associated with payment ␶i. Payment ␶i includes time spent contacting or contributing to one’s elected representative, paying for a lobbyist, or marching in a demonstration to effect change. Further, and importantly

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for the extension to the aggregate below, ␶i is the net-of-private-benefits cost of institutional change; that is, ␶i takes into account private benefits that accrue to agent i during or because of his or her action as institutions evolve. These benefits might include direct resource transfers from policy-makers once the new institution is established or the psychological value placed on being part of a change as described in the analyses of transitions from autocracy to democracy in Zak and Feng (in press), Feng and Zak (1999). Clearly, institutions can be designed so that the cost of change ␶ can be high or low, depending on constitutional provisions, social norms, the gradient of institutional hierarchy, the extent to which the rule of law is followed, and the like. Institutional change criterion (1) is simply a discretized version of the standard optimality criterion of marginal benefit (the increase in utility) exceeding marginal cost (the utility loss from expenditure ␶ that reduces one’s feasible choice set). This criterion is an action plan: undertake payment ␶ to initiate change if (1) is satisfied. It is important to note in (1) that we have allowed that one’s satisfaction under new institution ␤ is not known with certainty before the change actually occurs. It is the expectation of future happiness that is crucial to the decision calculus. This is included in the analysis for two reasons. First, we permit for uncertainty surrounding whether payment ␶ will be effective in generating change. Intentional or unanticipated factors may block institutional evolution even if resources are supplied to effect change. Second, one’s happiness under the new institution ex post may not be exactly as one predicts ex ante. For example, it is well accepted that institutions induce perverse incentives for some in society that may impact others’ satisfaction. Possible and even unintended consequences can be included in condition (1) by construction variance bounds around one’s optimal consumption bundle under institution ␤. Even more worrisome, expected utility under a new institution may be ex ante incalculable, stopping the ability to implement change. Next, we extend the analysis to a society of heterogeneous individuals. Indeed, one of the primary extensions of foraging theory that we develop here is to examine how groups of heterogeneous individuals decide together to initiate institutional evolution. Because individuals have different levels of happiness under institution ␣ (i.e., for two individuals i ⫽j, ci*⫽c j* so that U␣(ci* )⫽U␣(c j* )), the motivation for institutional change varies across individuals. Let ␮ be a probability measure defined over all agents in the society that has the standard properties. For simplicity, suppose that each individual must


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pay ␶i to be part of the coalition that effects institutional reform, net of the private benefits. Then, the societal institutional evolution criterion is 兰EU␤(ci**)d␮ ⫺ 兰U␣(c*)d␮ ⬎ ⫺ 兰U(␶i)d␮

(2)

Criterion (2) generalizes (1) to a society as a whole, indicating that a new institution emerges when the aggregate marginal benefit to all individuals of the change exceeds the costs net of private benefits. Observe that because institutional change potentially produces private benefits to those involved, there is no free rider problem associated with criterion (2). Example Consider an institution ␣ (such as a constitutional amendment) that results in a progressive tax system for a society with three (types of ) individuals. Institution ␣ requires a legal change before the tax schedule can be adjusted. Suppose that each individual is in a different tax bracket, with tax rates 0 ⬍ x1 ⬍ x2 ⬍ x3 ⬍ 1. Suppose further that there is no betweengood distortion associated with this tax scheme so that the items in the optimal consumption bundle ci* satisfy ci* ⫽ (1 ⫺ xi)ci, where ci is the pretax optimum for i ⫽ 1, 2, 3. Consider an environment in which none of the individuals in this society have an incentive to expend resources to engender institutional evolution, that is, criterion (1) is not satisfied for any i ⫽ 1, 2, 3. Now suppose there is a change in the economic environment so that all agents’ incomes rise substantially (say due to economic growth). Because the tax system is progressive, this change causes all agents to face the highest tax rate x3. That is, under the same set of assumptions used in the first case, the new optima are ci** ⫽ (1 ⫺ x3)ci*, ᭙i. At this tax rate, under general conditions there exists an institutional change permitting a flat tax x ⬍ x3 that will satisfy condition (2). Thus, an institutional change permitting a flat tax policy will occur when taxes are sufficiently high that individuals’ utilities are higher under the new lower tax, taking into account the cost of political action.1 Implications of the Theory There are five primary implications of the institutional evolution condition (2). We present each along with a discussion of its meaning. 1. A Critical Mass is Necessary for Institutional Evolution The theory demonstrates that institutional change will not occur unless there is a sufficient proportion of the population for whom the existing institutions do not function well. Because there is a cost and uncertainty surrounding

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institutional change, the model shows that there is a bias toward “institutional inertia” that militates against transformation. Thus, if the existing institution works reasonably well for most people, institutional reform will by stymied— even if the existing institution is imperfect for most or all of the population. In addition, the willingness to contribute resources ␶i to institutional change (i.e., the expectation of the benefit U␤(ci**)) may depend upon the likelihood of others contributing. This classic “free rider” problem can be overcome by permitting private goods to flow to those who initiate institutional change, but the likelihood of success in some circumstances requires a critical mass of those taking action, that is, those with ␶i ⬍ 0. As examined extensively by Kuran (1995), many societies strongly discourage dissent so that one’s private goals will be hidden with “public lies” until a sufficient number of actors make their goals known. Such effects further contribute to institutional inertia, slowing the evolution of institutions. 2. Institutional Change can be Rapid and Unexpected by Policy-Makers As the economic–social–political environment evolves, small changes may induce the threshold in (2) to be exceeded. In ecological foraging theory this is known as the “zero-one effect” where, for example, some predator hunts and eats all of one prey species and none of another, following a direct analog of (1). A leading example of an unexpected radical institutional change is the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe. Kuran (1989, 1991) has called this the “prairie fire effect.” Similar transitions occurred throughout the world in the “third wave” of democratization (Huntington, 1991). Zak and Feng (in press) identify the properties of the distribution of individuals in a society that lead to rapid versus slow institutional evolution. They demonstrate in a related model that greater equality in the distribution of income promotes rapid institutional change as a small environmental alteration pushes a large proportion of individuals over the change threshold. In the model here, greater similarity among individuals causes a critical mass of individuals to exceed criterion (1) after a small change in the environment. 3. One Individual or a few Individuals Lead the Call for Change An important value of the model institutional change (2) is the decomposition of individual and aggregate effects. Specifically, since individuals face different costs and different benefits under a new institution, there will be heterogeneity in the amount each person is willing to contribute to effect change. Those who yield the greatest benefits (or face the lowest costs ␶i, which may even be negative costs), are those who will most strongly advocate for institutional change—even when all agents identically value costs and


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benefits. This has sometimes been called the “great man” (or person) theory of change, which the model shows derives directly from heterogeneous costs and benefits. A corollary of this implication is that not all individuals desire change. Thus, every institutional change will be met with some resistance. The model here reveals several reasons for such resistance, the foremost being that (1) is not satisfied for every individual. Note that the aggregate criterion (2) does not require that everyone desire change, just that sufficiently many do. The unmistakable consequence of the first three implications of the model is that institutional change should not be expected to occur easily. 4. Institutions Evolve more Rapidly when the Cost of Change is Low Institutions themselves specify how they can be changed. This may either facilitate change or inhibit it. In the model, an institution that is designed to be updated easily will have a low cost of change, ␶. For example, the U.S. constitution can be amended at a “moderate” cost with 27 amendments to date. Note though that Amendment 27, which disallows changes to the compensation of members of congress to take effect until after the next election, was adopted in May 1992, but was first proposed in September 1789! An interesting extension of the model would be to assess the optimal cost of institutional change so that change does not occur too often (inhibiting long-term planning) nor is change prohibitively difficult. A related criterion was developed by Cooter (2001) regarding the frequency of elections. 5. For a Given Environment, Risk Aversion Slows Institutional Change Under the standard assumptions on the utility function, criterion (2) is less likely to be satisfied if the institutional change under consideration has a large variance in possible outcomes associated with it. More simply, if the range of utility levels for the new and uncertain institution ␤ are sufficiently large, then (2) will not be satisfied even when ␶i is small for all individuals. Equivalently, the higher the level of risk aversion among individuals, the slower will institutions evolve. Highly risk adverse agents, following criterion (2) are less likely to experiment with a new institution because they fear what might happen in this new world. Societies that are more accustomed to taking risks will have institutions that evolve more quickly. 6. For a Given Level of Risk Aversion, a Larger Variance in the Environment Induces More Rapid Institutional Evolution Counter to the effect of risk aversion discussed in the preceding, as the environment becomes riskier—in the sense that the range of factors that cause

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the environment to change is larger—the likelihood that a given institutional environment works sufficiently well for enough people that (2) is not met is low.2 When the environment is rapidly changing, existing institutions are less likely to provide maximal happiness for all individuals in a society, even when institutions have built-in flexibility regarding the policies enacted. As a result, the institutional evolution criterion (2) will be met often, and the rate of institutional evolution will be rapid. Clearly, the greater flexibility that institutions have regarding how policy is set, the more likely that policies will make individuals better off. Here we are ignoring the incentives that politicians have to set policies that do not benefit society as a whole but satisfy personal incentives for enrichment or reelection that are discussed in Ghate and Zak (2002) and Mueller (1989). Note that in the model sketched here, there is no value in having more stable policies or institutions over time, even though such factors impact an economy’s growth rate by affecting businesses’ planning horizons (Zak, 2000). If the business-planning horizon were including in criterion (2), even greater institutional inertia would occur than indicated from implications 1 and 5 above. The overall effect of uncertainty on institutional evolution from implications 5 and 6 is: uncertainty has two competing effects on institutional evolution. The more uncertain an environment, the greater the rate of institutional change, but the more uncertain the outcome from such a change, the slower will institutions evolve because of risk aversion. There is no way to determine in general which effect dominates since rapidly changing environments are likely associated with greater uncertainty regarding the performance of an institution under consideration. We therefore conjecture that moderate uncertainty will slow institutional evolution while very high levels of uncertainty, such as follow an economic or political crisis, will stimulate the emergence of new institutions. An important corollary is that if one can gain information about the performance of a new institution, for example, by running a small-scale experiment, then subjective uncertainty (variance) regarding the effect of a change falls and institutional evolution is more likely. Thus, for those interested in institutional change, there is a benefit to acquiring and publicizing information regarding the benefits, if any, of a change in institutions. This is especially true for an institution with which individuals are unfamiliar and may overestimate the riskiness of a change, just as individuals regularly overestimate risks with which they are unfamiliar, such as airline accidents or radiation leaks from nuclear power plants.


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Extensions The selection process for new institutions, while following static criterion (2), may involve more explicit evolutionary dynamics. For example, individuals may learn about the potential payoffs to a new institutional design. The society-wide institutional choice requires that members have a shared mental model (Denzau and North, 1994) of where they want to go. In the context of the model, this would require that potentially every individual have a different metric Ui(●) by which institutions are evaluated. This increases the difficulty of changing institutions substantially, causing a high degree of institutional inertia. Further, the selection process is explicitly one of trial and error. The tradeoff implicit in (2) can be succinctly stated as “explore or exploit.” Should society exploit the existing institution or explore for a new one with an uncertain return. There are several deep issues we have so far ignored in this discussion about the cognitive process by which humans and societies learn. Without delving into an extensive discussion on this topic, we conjecture that another source of institutional inertia is cognitive inertia: individuals continue to exploit rules of thumb that work reasonably well because change entails cognitive costs. Until the expected cognitive benefits of exploring new institutions are clearly positive relative to its certain cost change will not occur, that is, individuals cognitively follow rule (1).

Applications Every individual or organization must choose how much to invest in exploiting known information, and how much to invest in exploring for information. A fundamental result from the model is that the optimal response depends in part on the uncertainty in the environment. When the environment is more uncertain, or the more it has changed recently, the greater resources should be put into exploration over exploitation. We illustrate the results of the model with some examples. The first example is a straightforward application in a private market, that for motor vehicles in the 1970s when the price of gasoline trebled twice, in 1973 and in 1979, following two oil shocks that hit the United States. This example will illustrate some of the implications of the model, and then we segue into some examples from the public sector, involving both public policy as well as issues of institutional structure. Some further possible implications of the ideas are then briefly mentioned in the final section.

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The U.S. Auto Industry in the 1970s The American auto industry had faced previous challenges in the post–Second World War era, but these had typically involved niche markets. For example, the import of the Volkswagen Beetle began in 1949, but its market share was never over 5 percent, and it satisfied a demand for small, fuel-efficient cars that Detroit viewed as an unprofitable niche. The market for sports cars was met in 1955 by the Thunderbird and Corvette, but these were much larger than the European cars in this niche. The Ford Mustang of 1964 was similarly positioned. In most other import segments the niches were quite small, and Detroit seemed to feel little was lost by not entering these segments and competing against imports. The engineering expertise of the American firms: the Big Three (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) and American Motors, was obtained to a considerable extent through education at the University of Michigan. All the firms were headquartered around Detroit and executives lived in the suburbs around the city. They primarily shared ideas among themselves unless they were launching a new vehicle line. While some attention was paid to Europe, through subsidiaries competing there, none of the firms devoted much attention to Japan. Before the Second World War, Ford and GM had Japanese motor vehicle subsidiary firms that produced almost all vehicles registered in the country between 1926 and 1935. To assert independence from American control during the Chinese Incident, the May 1936 automobile manufacturing enterprise law was issued, requiring all moderate to large firms to be licensed, and that these must have majority Japanese ownership. Thus, the Ford Japan and GM Japan ties were severed and no attempt was made after the war to reestablish them. Competitor intelligence simply broke down during the 1970s. The oil shock of 1973 led to a large increase in the demand for fuel-efficient vehicles, which Detroit could not supply quickly. This resulted in a large run-up in imported passenger car market share, from 15.3 percent in 1973 to 27.3 percent in 1981. As indicated by our model, Detroit should have shifted much of its effort toward external information sources. While some efforts were devoted to this after 1973, Detroit was again unprepared for the second oil shock in 1979. The result in 1980 were total losses of over $4 billion, including the then-largest loss in corporate history; in real terms, this may still be the largest operating loss ever recorded. Trade Protection The American motor vehicle industry, facing huge losses, had undertaken various actions to stem losses starting in 1973. In 1979, Chrysler had gone


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to Washington for help, receiving a federal loan guarantee that came with stock warrants whose value plummeted with the 1980 losses. This enabled the firm to focus on exploiting its internal information regarding new vehicle designs that had come to it from Ford along with several new managers, led by Lee Iacocca, Chrysler’s CEO. But the new oil shock threatened to derail the plans, and Iacocca went to Washington again (and created a large public relations campaign) for trade protection against imports of Japanese cars. He was joined by the other Big Three firms, who exploited their information about the external environment, and that of Washington, in order to get trade protection from the new Reagan administration in March 1981, in the form of a Voluntary Export Restraint agreement with Japan. This nicely illustrates implication 3 from the model (change can be led by one or a few individuals), as well as implication 6 (change is more rapid when there is a crisis). This suggests that the external environment that matters to the firm, and the information used from that environment, can be of several sorts. Ford, for example, had spent much of the time since 1973 learning how Toyota succeeded in making profits every quarter even during the Japanese oil shock recession of 1973–1974 (one of the very few large Japanese firms to do so, making it and the Toyota Production System famous for the first time within Japan itself ). In 1983, GM created a joint venture directly with Toyota called New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI) that took over a shuttered assembly plant in Fremont, California, to be operated by Toyota managers. GM managers hoped that this would enable them to learn the Toyota system and diffuse it to other parts of GM. GM, unlike Ford, was not fully committed to this external learning process, however. GM was a highly diversified set of businesses, many of which were still profitable, and had the best balance sheet of the Big Three. GM had very little debt, and committed large amounts of resources to new vehicles and manufacturing automation during the 1980s. Ford, on the other hand, faced bankruptcy in late 1980, and committed itself to exploring for information in the external environment, particularly what it could learn from Toyota, and revamped its manufacturing during the first half of the 1980s (Womack et al., 1990). Their success in this external exploration enabled them to become the highest-quality, lowest-cost North American motor vehicle manufacturer. GM, on the other hand, attempted to exploit a different technology, that of robotics, and spent tens of billions of dollars during the 1980s in automation efforts in its manufacturing facilities. This effort helped to whittle down the net worth on its balance sheet until GM’s Board of Directors asserted control in 1992, removing the CEO and forcing exploration of the external environment.

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The focus on trade protection by the Big Three in 1981, like that of Big Steel since 1969, suggests the various external environments that can be explored and then exploited. Once a firm and its trade association (the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, in the case of motor vehicles) have explored the Washington environment, it is relatively cheaper to exploit that information to build competitive advantage, rather than focusing on the business of making motor vehicles in order to create competitive advantage. This allocation of effort depends on perceived returns following criterion (1), both immediately and over the longer run, but the immediate goal of survival often makes political exploration and exploitation the first option for a firm or industry. A similar situation occurred, albeit with somewhat different results, in the semiconductor industry. In the late 1940s, all electronic products used vacuum tubes for their active devices such as amplifiers, and the like. Tubes were hot: considerable energy was created as waste heat in the process of generating streams of electrons inside the vacuum. They were also quite large and delicate. The discovery of the transistor by W. Shockley, J. Bardeen, and W. Brattain at Bell Labs in 1947 opened up a new possibility—semiconductors for active devices. The creation of the integrated circuit by Jack Kolby in 1958 and Robert Noyce in 1959 started a process of integrating multiple devices on a single chip (typically less than a fifth of an inch square) enabling a continuing shrinkage of the size of active devices and multiplying the number of active devices that could be put on a single chip. Today, devices with over 50 million transistors can be put on a single chip, and the number doubles (Moore’s Law, stated by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corp. in 1968) approximately every 12–18 months. In such a situation, internal learning about fabrication processes and exploration of the external environment consisting of other semiconductor firms in the United States was dominant until the 1980s. By that time, the Japanese had been exporting chips for ten years, and the research joint ventures promoted by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) had been successful in getting some of the firms to world-class manufacturing levels. American firms were blindsided by the successful exporting capabilities of these firms, and the Japanese market share in North America rose from below 10 percent in the late 1970s to 24.3 percent in 1988. Several responses occurred within the United States. Some firms, such as IBM, relied on their connections to Washington and pursued protectionist policies. Others realized the growing potential for industrial disintegration, with American firms choosing to shed some of their manufacturing and


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relying instead on silicon foundries in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia for their fabrication work. Related to this change, some firms focused on their design and manufacturing expertise, but realized the potential advantage of Asian allies. These firms licensed their know-how to partners, especially in Korea. For example, A.T. & T. partnered with Lucky Goldstar to produce the new generation of memory chips, an essential component of PCs and other electronic equipment. When production problems at American memory firms occurred in 1988 in the shift from 256 K to 1 megabit chips, their customers, desperate for memory chips, pursued Japanese suppliers. Some of these Japanese firms attempted to leverage their ability to supply essential memory chips to acquire proprietary technology from the American buyers. The buyers complained to their friends in Congress and a new public–private partnership was proposed, called U.S. Memories Corp. An IBM vice president, headed up the effort, and policy appeared to be expanding beyond trade protection into a new level of industrial policy. Right at this point, the memory gap was closed by new supplies coming from Korean firms, most of whom were partners of American firms that had licensed their technology to them. This effort by the American partners changed the competitive environment for all memory producers, as well as their downstream customers making PCs. It also removed the apparent need for U.S. Memories, which quickly folded. The presence of quite different responses to the Japanese competitive challenge in memory chips resulted in a very different outcome than would have occurred if public policy and trade protection had been the dominant response. The ongoing evolutionary process of creative destruction (Schumpeter, 1942: ch. 7) would have been greatly slowed in the same way that productivity in the steel industry would have been reduced if the minimill sector of the industry had not paralleled the use of trade protection by Big (integrated) Steel. If firms had expected the industrial policy to be quickly and successfully introduced, interest in other possibilities might have been reduced. In the present case, the United States might have built a protected and possibly subsidized memory chip industry, but not obtained the cheaper memory that Korean entry made possible. Further, the Korean entry helped weaken the Japanese semiconductor juggernaut that seemed about to overwhelm the American industry. The demand and need for policy evolves as reality unfolds, and events can change very quickly in the modern global economy. Events in the automobile and semiconductor industries illustrate implications 1 (a critical mass is required for institutional evolution), 2 (institutional change can be rapid), and 4 (institutions evolve more rapidly when the cost of change is low).

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Federalism and Centralization Some believe that federalism is a compromise worked out in the U.S. Constitutional Convention between those who wanted sovereign state governments and those who preferred a more centralized system, and nothing more than that compromise. This appears to be a mistake. Similarly, there are espousers of federalism who see no comparative advantage to a centralized form of government. The argument made here gives specific examples of advantages of federalism and of a strong central government. A centralized system is more appropriate for exploiting a given body of knowledge, if that knowledge is appropriate to the environment in which the nation exists, while a federalist system, if it enables effective experimental trials, could more readily adapt to changing environmental conditions. This latter point has been stated by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (dissenting in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 1932) as the idea that the states can serve as the laboratories of democracy. Ideas can be tried in several states, with alternatives assessed and the more successful imitated by other states or the federal government. The use of multiple real trials allows for more rapid learning and is more appropriate to changing environmental conditions. On the other hand, when the problem is well-specified and the likely solutions clear, then centralization is a better coordination and diffusion mechanism. Each form of government has an environmental niche where it is the most successful. In a setting of substantial environmental change, with a substantial diversity of worldviews and beliefs in the nation’s population, a federalist form is likely to be the system that most easily adapts to the change following implication 6 of the model. Further, societies that are more risk adverse would, as implication 5 of the model shows, prefer a centralized rather than federalist system of government. The IMF Adapts to the Post–Cold War World The International Monetary Fund (IMF) developed a set of tools to manage currency crises faced in developing and developed countries during its first 43 years of existence. In typical cases, a government would get itself in trouble by running a fiscal deficit, financed to some extent by foreign capital inflows, and the IMF would come in to help out after the domestic currency had collapsed in value or foreign currency reserves were nearly depleted. The environment created many examples that allowed the IMF to learn about such situations, and it gradually codified means to manage these situations, albeit without permanent fixes, in some situations. Suddenly, the end of the Cold War led to a very different set of problems. Now, the size of capital inflows could easily be ten times as large as before,


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and borrowing was more likely to be by private parties not governments covering deficits. This new environment has generated new problems, as we live in a world of ubiquitous novelty, and the organizations in this world must continually respond to that novelty or face substantial problems. The scale of IMF bailouts, both successful and unsuccessful, is much larger after 1990 than before. The IMF has invested tens of billions of dollars in potential failures, such as Turkey and Argentina, and it is clear that it has not learned about new problems that have arisen in a truly effective manner. The IMF is responding to criticisms, but organizational learning has been slow on the basic crisis response described above. This may be due to a high degree of risk aversion, the lack of a critical mass at the IMF who want change, or the absence of a single individual to initiate change. Given a changed external environment and the potential size of new costly failures, without an institutional evolution the IMF will continue to fail in its management of current crises.

MITI During Catch-Up and Afterwards After the Second World War period of catch-up with the industrial economies, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) had a relatively easy job in its attempts at industrial policy. The technological capabilities of existing firms, and the technologies they might be able to readily adopt, were known to some extent to MITI and its businessgovernment consultative councils. Necessary government policies that did not involve much fiscal spending could be provided by MITI to allow a period of learning a new technology, product, or industry. Acquisition of proprietary technology could be arranged through MITI. In such cases, MITI required the foreign technology holder to license, on the same terms, all Japanese firms that wanted to move into the new field. The necessary external learning was fairly clear after some external exploration, with MITI engaging in much of this, while the firms could focus their efforts on internal exploitation of the newly acquired external knowledge. Only a few firms such as Sony seemed to work regularly at exploring the external environment without the intermediation of MITI. The story of Akio Morita, head of Sony, going to Bell Labs to license the new transistor patent only to have MITI try to stop his efforts, is legend but true (www.sony.co.jp/ en/Fun/SH/1-4/h3.html). But the story is well known because it is so unusual in the 1945–1970 period. Another case is the partnership of Chrysler and Mitsubishi Motors announced in 1969 that derailed MITI’s plans to merge Japanese motor vehicles production into two or three firms.

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The 1970s were traumatic for Japan not only because of the oil shocks. Maturity and slower growth hit many industries, beginning a variety of longer-term problems, but immediately creating a difficulty for those firms on the technological frontier. From then on, MITI could no longer play as much of a useful role in aiding the technological advancement of Japanese firms. The firms themselves needed to develop more internal research capabilities, and needed to explore more intensely themselves the external environment to find opportunities that might match their specific skills. This also required an institutional evolution in Japanese firms, moving from hierarchical governance structures to a more horizontal or individualistic approach where a single individual or research unit could discover a new innovation. If MITI continued to attempt to play the role of trying to identify new leading sectors for firms to move into; that is, to engage in the type of industrial policy that Chalmers Johnson and others wanted the U.S. government to do, then it faced a very different set of tasks and likely solutions than it had used during the catch-up period (Johnson, 1982). A very different relation was needed with domestic firms given the external technological environment, as MITI was no longer just searching for and coordinating the acquisition of existing foreign technologies. In fact, much of MITI’s energies have recently been devoted to the negative side of industrial policy, trying to reduce private resource commitments to failing industries. Its success in these endeavors is mixed, with politics interfering in MITI’s attempts to cut back capacity in several sunset sectors (see Denzau, 1984; Calder, 1993). Term Limits and Adaptive Learning A successful innovation in politics, the introduction of term limits for legislative and some other offices, commenced in 1990 in Oklahoma, Colorado, and California. For example, Oklahoma limited the tenure in office of any legislator to 12 years, while Colorado limited tenure to 8. This process may well have benefits, as suggested by the successful introduction of term limits in some 21 states (see table 1, Scott and Bell, 1999), but it may also have costs not mentioned by its proponents. Any evolutionary process must maintain the selected population members. In an evolutionary process of idea generation, there must be a memory of the relatively successful ideas. Without that memory, evolution cannot operate to continuously increase institutional quality. One might argue that career politicians represent a system of institutional memory for the political system. It is not the only possible institutional


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memory mechanism by any means. A written constitution similarly can represent the memory of past solutions to then-current problems at the time the constitution was written or amended. By changing the set of political actors more frequently, the selection criteria are also changed. The process of evolutionary change is affected by both introducing transcription errors in the memory process and moving selection filters, due to changing personnel. The argued-for buildup of institutional knowledge may still occur but may become embodied in the permanent bureaucratic staff of the governmental unit, not in the term-limited politicians. The overall effects on the dynamics of the system are very hard to discern, given the complications identified here. The Penn World Tables and the NLS Tapes Intellectual enterprises also reflect some of the same patterns already considered. Typical empirical work in economics and political economy usually involves an exploitation of existing literature and data sources, although there may be some exploration of both new literature and data. In some literatures, the share of each can be predicted with relative ease. Consider a literature that has just acquired a new, highly satisfactory database, which contains variables reflecting the phenomena that the literature is intended to explain. A lot of initial work will go into exploiting that database, developing the relations that can be examined with it, and considerable learning about it will occur. At that point, the literature is likely to shift to a very different sort. Further work of exploitation has become of much lower value. New papers involving only exploitation will yield little new or novel results, and are not likely to be published in the better journals. At this point, the best work will involve exploration and not just exploitation. The focus is on finding new variables, concepts, and explanations to examine, and this will often involve going to other literatures, often in different disciplines, and finding measures that no one has used before. These new data sources will be merged into the basic database that all in the field employ, and others will often begin to use the new data as well. This pattern seems to reflect what has happened in the labor literature on wages and participation, with the advent of the National Longitudinal Survey in 1966, interviewing 5,020 men aged 45–59. The rapid advance in the labor economics literature that occurred along with the equally rapid development of econometric techniques required to best exploit the new data, is what our theory claims would occur. A similar pattern is still working its way out in the literature of growth theory since the presentation of the Penn World Tables (PWT) by Summers and Heston (1988). The initial work

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focused on exploiting this data along with some relatively standard set of existing sources, such as the International Financial Statistics (IFS), and the like. Political variables were brought in during the 1990s, but again from existing political datasets, such as Polity, or Banks’ event data. The new period began with the use of international investor services data on political risk, the Business Environmental Risk Intelligence (BERI) and International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) data used by Keefer and Knack (1995). Since then, a wide variety of new sources of data have been brought into the literature, with an increase in the sets of questions and hypotheses investigated. The continued vibrancy of this literature is reflected and driven by this successful exploration of new external data sources, consistent with our arguments. Islam as an Adaptive Learning System Islamic civilizations have been the conduit for much of Greek learning and also the generator of much that has become part of Western civilization. It has had periods of extremely dynamic vitality and other periods of stagnation. These periods, we believe, are explicable in terms of the ideas developed here. Menocal (2002) surveys the dynamic intellectual civilization of AlAndalus, centered in Cordoba, Spain, from 756 to 1009. This civilization involved Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars, at times working together on related problems, developing ideas beyond the Greek heritage they helped to translate into more commonly used languages. The tolerance shown toward other “religionists of the book” by the Islamic rulers is notable and contrasts strongly with the later Roman Catholic Inquisition that so powerfully swept Spain. But as Menocal points out, it was not these Christians who directly destroyed this “Ornament of the World.” Instead, it was other, far less-tolerant Islamic rulers who attacked and ended this golden age of intellectual blooming and openness, again closing their society to external influences. This pattern, we believe, is at the heart of much of the inability of Muslim countries in history to compete with the societies around them. When an Islamic society keeps itself open to external ideas, allowing exploration of the external, often non-Islamic culture, that society has the chance to gain intellectually and economically. Closing itself off to external influences, focusing solely on exploiting its existing core of knowledge, can work for a period, but such insularity eventually results in falling behind the knowledge developed elsewhere and creating the opportunity that was taken by Europe after the First World War to enter and control the Middle East, making the Muslims second-class citizens in their own lands. While this idea is largely speculative at this point, we expect that further work will help refine and likely corroborate much of this claim. Instead of pursuing this in the present work, we leave it to future research.


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Conclusions This chapter has demonstrated that evolutionary theory can be fruitfully used to study public policy dynamics. The basic evolutionary model identifies three steps in which to analyze elements of change. Adapting this three-step process to society as a whole, using an extension of optimal foraging theory, has permitted us to characterize the way that institutions evolve. As institutions evolve, public policy changes—policies that either move society toward better outcomes, or restrain them from achieving a social optimum. In the face of environmental change, policies that encourage new trials speed the rate of adaptation. New institutional models are also more readily adopted when public policy establishes multiple and parallel approval filters. This is a description of a decentralized polity (or when policies are made within firms, a free enterprise economy). In both the government and corporate spheres, competitive forces induce entities to respond to environmental change or face a loss of political power or loss of market share, respectively. What the model shows, though, is that new trials are costly and an excessive number of new trails constitute a social burden. Thus as condition (2) demonstrates, policies that encourage the evolution of institutions must balance the expected value of change with its costs. For example, barriers to the creation of new entities (or subentities) provide some protection from excessive experimentation, but competition is ever-present, particularly in federalized governments and even in autocracies (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2002). We caution, though, that the balance our model identifies for efficient institutional change is difficult to achieve. For example, most of the industrial promotion activities emanating from Washington D.C. have been so fragmented that the United States has avoided the slowing of adaptive change that besets most European economies. Quixotically, the near-gridlock at the national level in the United States may actually work to promote change at the state and local levels. Conversely, when it comes to organizational policy, the ease of starting new businesses, the availability of venture capital, and the thick infrastructure of business services ease the generation of a new trial. Failure is socially much less costly in this country than it is, for example, in Japan, where business failure is often viewed as the end of one’s reputation and that of one’s family. In settings with little environmental change, our model demonstrates that centralization effectively supports exploitation of existing information and avoiding wasteful exploration and change. In such an environment, public policy should promote only gradual change. Standardization, for example, is a policy that focuses experimentation at improving existing systems.

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The American and European experiences with mobile phones illustrate this issue. The Europeans standardized on Global System for MobileCommunications (GSM) as their second-generation digital technology, and any GSM phone can be used in the 168 countries throughout the world on that standard. In the United States, with substantially less government-led coordination, technology was viewed as an industry choice, and a collection of incompatible technologies and frequencies exist. For over a decade, it was difficult and costly to go from city to city and use a cell phone. Consolidation has now led to some national networks, but largely with technologies or frequencies that are incompatible with the GSM standard outside the United States. The analysis in this chapter permits us to draw the following fundamental conclusion: public policy responds to incentives in the institutional environment at the time policy is chosen, while at the same time public policy critically impacts the evolution of institutions. Notes 1. An analysis of the politics of tax cuts that is consistent with the institutional change model here can be found in Denzau and Munger (1986) and Ghate and Zak (2002); recent quantitative estimates of the effects of tax cuts are in Hayakawa and Zak (2002). 2. Criterion (2) can be written explicitly in terms of the variance of outcomes; on this see Weinhold and Zak (2001).

References Bates, Robert H., Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Barry R. Weingast. (1998). Analytic Narratives. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, Alastair Smith, Randall Siverson, and James Morrow. (2002). The Logic of Political Survival. Manuscript, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Calder, Kent E. (1993). Strategic Capitalism: Private Business and Public Purpose in Japanese Industrial Finance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cooter, Robert D. (2001). The optimal number of governments for economic development. In Market-Augmenting Government: The Institutional Foundations for Prosperity. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Denzau, Arthur T. (1984). Removing the shackles. Transaction Social Science and Modern Society 22(1): 29–36. Denzau, Arthur T. and Douglas C. North. (1994). Shared mental models: Ideologies and institutions. Kyklos 47(1): 3–31.


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Denzau, Arthur T. and Michael Munger. (1986). Legislators and interest groups: How unorganized interests get represented. American Political Science Review 80: 89–106. Easterly, William. (2001). The Elusive Quest for Growth. Cambridge: MIT Press. Feng Yi and Paul J. Zak. (1999). The determinants of democratic transitions. Journal of Conflict Resolution 43(2): 162–177. Feng, Yi, Jacek Kugler, and Paul J. Zak. (2000). The politics of fertility and economic development. International Studies Quarterly 44(2): 667–694. Ghate, Chetan and Paul Zak. (2002). Growth of government and the politics of fiscal policy. Structural Change and Economic Dynamics. 13(4): 435–455. Hayakawa, Tatsuji and Paul J. Zak. (2002). Debt, death and taxes. International Tax and Public Finance 9: 157–173. Huntington, Samuel P. (1991). Democracy’s third wave. Journal of Democracy 2(2): 12–34. Johnson, Chalmers. (1982). MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Keefer, Phillip and Stephen Knack. (1995). Institutions and economic performance: Cross-country tests using alternative institutional measures. Economics and Politics 7: 207–227. Krebs, John R. and David W. Stephens. (1986). Foraging Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kuran, Timur. (1989). Sparks and prairie fires: A theory of unanticipated political revolution. Public Choice 61: 41–74. ——. (1991). The East European revolution of 1989: Is it surprising that we were surprised? American Economic Review 81: 121–125. ——. (1995). Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mantzavinos, C. (2001). Individuals, Institutions, and Markets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Menocal, Maria Rosa. (2002). The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. Mueller, Dennis. (1989). Public Choice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262, 311 (1932). North, Douglass. (1990). Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schumpeter, Joseph A. (1942). Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper. Scott, Kevin M. and Lauren Cohen Bell. (1999). Modeling mistrust: An event history analysis of term limits for state legislators. Presentation at Southern Political Science Association. Somit, Albert and Steven Peterson (Eds.). (2001). Evolutionary Approaches in the Behavioral Sciences. New York: Elsevier.

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Summers, Robert and Alan Heston. (1988). A new set of international comparisons of real product and price levels estimates for 130 countries, 1950–1985. Review of Income and Wealth 34(1): 1–25. Weinhold, Diana and Paul J. Zak. (2001). Private sector labor supply. Working Paper, London School of Economics and Claremont Graduate University. Womack, James P., Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos. (1990). The Machine that Changed the World: How Japan’s Secret Weapon in the Global Auto Wars Will Revolutionize Western Industry. New York: Harper. Zak, Paul J. (2000). Socio-political instability and the problem of development. In Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Hilton Root (Eds.), Governing for Prosperity. New Haven: Yale University Press. ——. (2002). Institutions, property rights and growth. Louvain Economic Review 68(1–2): 55–73. Zak, Paul J. and Arthur T. Denzau. (2001). Economics is an evolutionary science. In Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson (Eds.), Evolutionary Approaches in the Behavioral Sciences. New York: Elsevier. Zak, Paul J. and Yi Feng. (In press). A dynamic theory of the transition to democracy. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

CHAPTER 10

Maclean’s Evolutionary Neuroscience and the Conflict Systems Neurobehavioral Model: Some Clinical and Social Policy Implications Gerald A. Cory, Jr.

Introduction In view of the spectacular recent progress in modern genetics, molecular neurobiology, and evolutionary neuroscience, the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) is no longer tenable from a scientific perspective. Inevitably the social sciences will, however incrementally and tentatively, be motivated to find an accommodation with the new advances in the natural sciences. Unfortunately, the resistance of social scientists to biological explanations has been stiffened by the growing pains of the biological approaches themselves. For reasons unclear, mainstream biological writings have persistently overemphasized the negative aspects of emerging consilience with the social sciences (see Panksepp and Panksepp, 2000), exacerbating concerns about genetic determinism, unmitigated selfishness, virulent competition, inevitable conflict, invidious gender, and racial differentials—raising the specter of eugenics and other forms of social Darwinism. The positive messages from the biological sciences for a better society have not shared equal time. This chapter aims, in part, at redressing the imbalance.

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Understood positively, the new findings in the biological sciences offer the opportunity for clarification of our human values and provide the basis for moral and rational choices about the kind of society we wish to build for ourselves. The previously neglected evolutionary approach of Paul MacLean provides the foundation in neuroscience for the explication of the caring, nurturing, cooperative, even altruistic behaviors expressed clearly at the foundation of the social order, but often obscured by the mainstream preoccupation with the negative aspects of human nature. Although our genes structure our basic social architecture, it is not cast in concrete—that is, its mature expression is modified by development and environmental experience. It emerges through an environmentally interactive process of development and socialization allowing a considerable range of variability within a fundamental gene-specified framework. In other words we have choice in the degree to which we are selfish and conflict-ridden or cooperative and nurturing as individuals and as a society. Biology needs the full engagement of responsible social scientists to assure we make the right choices to create a society that expresses the life-affirming and society-enhancing potentialities of our genes. The familiar triune modular brain concept of pioneer evolutionary neuroresearcher Paul MacLean, neglected and misrepresented by mainstream neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, has recently enjoyed a resurgence of scholarly interest (e.g., Panksepp, 1998; Damasio, 1999; Cory, 1999, 2000a,b; Lieberman, 2000; Cory and Gardner, 2002). In a series of recent publications, I have modified and extended MacLean’s concepts into a dynamic model of our neural social architecture, called the conflict systems neurobehavioral (CSN) model, that may be coherently represented mathematically (Cory, 1999, 2000a,b, 2001a,b, 2002). The resulting equation of sociality permits fresh, integrative insights with descriptive and predictive utility for the healing sciences as well as for our social, economic, and political structures and behaviors. This chapter develops the CSN model with its associated equation and reports some recent exploration into its policy implications. This development requires a brief review of the modified triune brain concept, a graphic representation of the new model accompanied by an algorithmic description of its dynamic function. From the Triune Brain to the CSN Model In his 1990 masterwork, The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions, MacLean tells us that the primary function of the human brain is the preservation of the individual self and the human species. Although this

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may be said of the nervous system of any organism that must survive as an individual to reproduce, MacLean leads us to consider not just automatisms or tightly prewired instinctual mechanisms but also the evolved social architecture of the human brain upon which choices are made. His concept of brain evolution provides the necessary conceptual platform for this undertaking. MacLean documents the human brain as an evolved three-level interconnected, modular structure (figure 10.1). This structure includes a self-preservational component reflecting gene-based continuity from our ancestral reptiles, which split off from the dinosaur ancestral line during the Permian and Triassic periods between 225 and 250 million years ago. This is called the protoreptilian complex. Also included are a later modified and evolved mammalian affectional complex, and a most recently modified and elaborated higher neocortex representing the higher centers of the brain. As brain evolution continued in the branching vertebrate line ancestral to humans, simple protoreptilian brain structure was not replaced, but was modified and elaborated. The protoreptilian structure, then, provided the substructure and gene-based continuities (called homologues) for later brain development while largely retaining its basic character and function. The mammalian modifications and neocortical elaborations that followed reached the greatest development in the brain of humankind. Appreciating the qualitative differences of the three levels is important to understanding the dynamics of human social experience and behavior. The protoreptilian brain tissues in humans are proposed, as they did in the ancestral vertebrates, to govern the fundamentals, or the daily master

NEOCORTEX NEOMAMMALIAN COMPLEX

PALEOMAMMALIAN COMPLEX REPTILIAN COMPLEX

Figure 10.1 The interconnected, modular triune brain (After MacLean)

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routines, of our life-support operations: blood circulation, heartbeat, respiration, basic food-getting, reproduction, and defensive behaviors. These were functions and behaviors also necessary in the ancient ancestral reptiles as well as earlier amphibians and fishes. Located by MacLean in what are usually called the hindbrain and the midbrain (i.e., the brain stem) as well as in certain structures at the base of the forebrain (i.e., the basal ganglia), this primal and innermost core of the human brain made up almost the entire brain in ancestral fishes, amphibians, and reptiles (although not necessarily their modern representatives since they, too, have undergone further evolution). The next developmental stage of our brain, which comes from rudimentary mammalian life and which MacLean called the paleo- or “old” mammalian brain, is identified with the structures designated collectively as our limbic system. Developing from gene-based continuities preexisting in the protoreptilian brain, these limbic tissue-clusters included significant elaboration of such physiological structures as the amygdala, the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, the thalamus, and the limbic cingulate cortex. Behavioral contributions to life from these modified and elaborated paleo-mammalian structures, or limbic system, included, among other things, the mammalian features (absent in our ancestral reptiles) of warm-bloodedness, nursing, infant care, and extended social bonding. These new characteristics were then neurally integrated with the life-support functional and behavioral circuitry of the protoreptilian brain tissues to create the more complex life form of mammals. The neocortex, which MacLean called the neo- or “new” mammalian brain, is the most recent stage of brain modification and elaboration. This great mass of hemispherical brain matter that dominates the skull case of higher primates and man, by elaborating the preexisting continuities present in the brains of early vertebrates, overgrew and encased the earlier (“paleo-”) mammalian and protoreptilian neural tissues, but essentially did not replace them. As a consequence of this neocortical evolution and growth, those older brain parts evolved greater complexity and extensive interconnected circuitry with these new tissue structures. In this way, they produced the behavioral adaptations necessary to life’s increasingly sophisticated circumstances. The unique features of our human brain were refined over a period of several million years in a mainly kinship-based foraging society where sharing or reciprocity was necessary to our survival. Such sharing and reciprocity strengthened the adaptive evolution of the now combined mammalian characteristics of self-preservation and affection. Ego and empathy, self-interest and other-interest, are key features of our personal and social behavior. To relate these to MacLean’s concept we need a behavioral rather than a neurophysiological vocabulary—one that will express what the presence of our

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protoreptilian self-preserving mechanisms and paleomammalian affectional brain structures mean with regard to our day-to-day, subjectively experienced, behavioral initiatives and responses to one another and the world we live in. The CSN Model The CSN model (figure 10.2) uses computer-related vocabulary and assigns a dynamic to MacLean’s conceptual platform. Our self-preservation and affection programs are interconnected and motivated neural network circuits that subjectively generate and drive specific, and objectively observable, behaviors. These core motivational (and emotional) circuits are cognitively represented in the frontal regions of our neocortex as ego and empathy respectively. They serve as dynamic factors of our behavior. That is, they are dynamically driven by our cellular as well as overall bodily processes of metabolism as mediated by hormonal, neurotransmitter, and neural architecture. Each is an inseparable part of our makeup, because each is “wired into” our brain structure by the process of evolution. The degree of genome control seems, however, to vary with the mechanism. Older brain parts like the hindbrain and parts of the limbic system, phylogenetically old

Empathy Other interest

Executive Program Affectional Program

Ego Self interest

Self-preservation Program

Figure 10.2 The CSN model. A simplified cutaway representation of the brain showing the behavioral programs and the derivation of ego/self-interested and empathy/other-interested motives and behaviors. I should note that earlier models, for example, Freud (id, ego, and superego) postulated three-part conflictual models. Freud, however, was unable to tie his model to brain circuitry and it remained ungrounded in neural science because brain research had simply not advanced to that point.

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and necessary for survival, seem to be more closely under gene control. Other more recent tissues in the neocortex depend also on development and environmental experience. Neuroresearcher Antonio Damasio (1994, 1999) uses the terms preset and preorganized, apparently (and appropriately, I think) to avoid the implication of an overly deterministic prewiring in some brain regions. Behavioral conflict potentially exists, then, simply by virtue of the presence of these two large-scale dynamic modular program sets in our lives—up and running even prior to birth. Behavioral tension, which we may subjectively experience as frustration, anxiety, or anger, occurs whenever one of our two fundamental behavioral programs—self-preservation or affection—is activated but meets with some resistance or difficulty that blocks its satisfactory expression. This subjective tension becomes most paralyzing when both programs are activated and seek contending or incompatible responses within a single situation. Caught between “I want to” and “I can’t”—for example, “I want to help him/her, but I can’t surrender my needs”—we agonize. Whether this tension arises through the thwarted expression of a single impulse or the simultaneous but mutually exclusive urgings of two contending impulses, whenever it remains unresolved or unmanaged it leads to the worsening condition of behavioral stress. The evolutionary process by which the two opposite promptings of selfpreservation and affection were combined in us helped us to survive by binding us in social interaction and providing us with the widest range of behavioral responses to our environment. Our inborn conflicting programs are a curse, then, only to the degree that we fail to recognize them as a blessing. Our self-preservation and affection programs allow us a highly advanced sensitivity to our environment, keeping our interactive social behaviors within survival limits as well as enabling us to perceive and appreciate the survival requirements of others. Ironically, the accompanying behavioral tension—even the stress!—is an integral part of this useful function, for it allows us to more immediately evaluate our behavior and the effect it is having on ourselves and others. Behavioral tension serves as an internal emotional compass that we can use to guide ourselves through the often complicated and treacherous pathways of interpersonal relations. Behavioral stress tells us that we are exceeding safe limits for ourselves and others, and for our larger social, economic and political structures. Our executive programming seated in our frontal cortex (Pribram, 1973, 1994; Fuster, 1999; Miller and Cummings, 1999; also Miller and Cohen, 2001; Goldberg, 2001), cognitively represents the limbic and protoreptilian subcortical inputs, making what may be thought of as our moral as well as

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rational choices among our conflicting, impulsive, and irrational or nonrational motivations. This capacity to represent, generalize, and choose accompanied, of course, with language, is what differentiates us from even closely related primate species and makes findings in primate behavior, although highly interesting and unquestionably important, insufficient in themselves to fully understand and account for human behavior. The Major Ranges of Reciprocal Social Behavior The two master, inclusive and modular programs of self-preservation and affection that have been wired into our brain structure operate dynamically according to a set of subjectively experienced and objectively expressed behavioral rules, procedures, or algorithms. Understanding the workings and applications of these algorithms is the key to grasping the role of dialectical conflict, stress, and reciprocity in our personal and interactive lives. The major ranges of the CSN behavioral model (figure 10.3) illustrate the features of this ego-empathy dynamic. In the display, social behavior is EMPATHETIC RANGE self-sacrifice submission responsiveness supportiveness others over self

DYNAMIC BALANCE compromise fairness justice

Empathy Other interest

EGOISTIC RANGE power-seeking domination assertiveness competitiveness self over others

Executive Program Affectional Program SelfPreservation Program

Ego Self interest

Figure 10.3 The major ranges/modes of behavior. To simplify the graph, the three points are intended to mark the center points of each range, with varying mixes of ego and empathy on either side of each point. The graph thus intends to communicate, not a zero-sum, either/or set of behavioral options or expressions, but a spectrum of the increasing or decreasing (depending on direction of movement) proportions of ego and empathy in behavior. The graph represents only what may be thought of as central tendencies of interactive behavior, and is far too simple to represent all the shadings of emotion and motivation.

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divided from right to left into three main ranges called the egoistic range, the dynamic balance range, and the empathetic range. Each range represents a varying mix of egoistically and empathetically motivated behaviors. The solid line stands for ego and pivots on the word “ego” in the executive program of our brain diagram. The broken line stands for empathy and pivots on the word “empathy” in the diagram. The Egoistic Range The egoistic range indicates behavior dominated by self-preservation programming. Since the two behavioral programs are locked in inseparable unity, empathy is present here, but to a lesser degree. Behavior in this range is self-centered or self-interested and may tend, for example, to be dominating, power-seeking, or even attacking, where empathy is less. When empathy is increased, ego behavior will become less harsh and may be described more moderately as controlling, competitive, or assertive. As empathy is gradually increased, the intersection of the two lines of the diagram will be drawn toward the range of dynamic balance. Ego behavior will be softened as empathy is added. But the defining characteristic of the egoistic, self-interested range is self-over-others. Whether we are blatantly power-seeking or more moderately assertive, in this range we are putting ourselves, our own priorities and feelings, ahead of others. The Empathetic Range The empathetic range represents behavior weighted in favor of empathy. Ego is present, but is taking a back seat. When ego is present to a minimal degree, empathetic behavior may tend to extremes of self-sacrifice and submission. When ego is increased, empathetic behaviors become moderated and may be described as supportive, responsive, or any of a variety of “others first” behaviors. As the influence of ego is gradually added, empathetic behavior will approach the range of dynamic balance. In the empathetic range, the key phrase to remember is others-over-self or others first. Whether we are at the extreme of self-sacrifice or more moderately responsive, we are putting the priorities and feelings of others ahead of our own. The Dynamic Balance Range The range of dynamic balance represents a working balance between ego and empathy. At this point our behavioral programs are operating in roughly equal measure. I speak of “working,” “rough,” or “dynamic” balance because the tug-and-pull between the two programs continues ceaselessly.

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The dynamic nature of the programming means that “perfect” balance may be a theoretical point, unattainable in practice. Our more balanced behavior tends to be characterized by equality, justice, sharing, and other behaviors that show respect for ourselves and others. In fact, respect for self and others is the keynote of the range of dynamic balance. Energy or Activity Level The extent to which the programs of self-preservation and affection, ego and empathy, are out of balance, or pulling against each other, is a measure of behavioral tension. We experience this behavioral tension both internally and between ourselves and others, in any relationship or interaction. Unmanaged or excessive tension becomes, of course, behavioral stress. But that’s not all. Important also is the degree of energy we give to the interaction or the relationship. The amount of energy we put into any activity depends mostly upon how important we think it is or how enthusiastic we feel about it. In competitive sports or contests, qualitative differences in energy are easily observed. In intellectual contests, like chess, the energy may be intense, but less obvious. The Reciprocal Algorithms of Social Behavior From the dynamic interplay of ego, empathy, and activity level come the following algorithmic rule statements: 1. Self-interested, egoistic behavior, because it lacks empathy to some degree, creates tension within ourselves and between our selves and others. The tension increases from low to high activity levels. And it increases as we move toward the extremes of ego. Within ourselves, the tension created by the tug of neglected empathy is experienced as a feeling of obligation to others or an expectation that they might wish to “even the score” with us. Within others, the tension created by our self-interested behavior is experienced as a feeling of imposition or hurt, accompanied by an urge to “even the score.” Children often reveal the dynamic of such behavior in a clear, unsophisticated form. Imagine two children playing on the living-room floor. One hits the other. The second child hits back, responding in kind. Or the children may not hit each other at all. One might instead call the other a bad name. The second child reciprocates, kicking off a round of escalating name-calling. One child may eventually feel unable to even the score and will complain to a parent to intervene. Most of us have experienced such giveand-take as children and have seen it countless times in our own children and

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grandchildren. Similar behavior is embarrassingly observable among adults. It can be seen in husband-and-wife arguments, bar fights, hockey games, political campaigns, even in sophisticated lawsuits. The rule operates not only in such highly visible conflict situations, but also in very subtle interactions—in the small behavioral exchanges, the ongoing give-and-take of all interpersonal relations. Expressive of the underlying conflictual excitatory/inhibitory dynamic of the neural architecture, we can say that the reactions that build in ourselves and others do so potentially in proportion to the behavioral tension created by egoistic, self-interested behavior. That is, the harder I hit you, the harder you hit me in return. Or the fouler name you call me, the fouler name I call you in return. Or perhaps with more sophistication, I resolve the tension in me by an act of visible “superiority.” I ignore you—although I could call you an even fouler name, if I chose. Behavior on the other side of the spectrum is described in the second rule statement: 2. Empathetic behavior, because it denies ego or self-interest to some degree, also creates tension within ourselves and others. This tension, likewise, increases as activity levels increase and as we move toward extremes of empathy. Within ourselves, the tension created by the tug of the neglected self-interest (ego) is experienced as a feeling that “others owe us one” and a growing need to “collect our due.” This tension, especially if it continues over time, may be experienced as resentment at being exploited, taken for granted, not appreciated, or victimized by others. Within others, the tension created is experienced as a sense of obligation toward us. The reactions that build in ourselves and others, again, are in proportion to the behavioral tension created. And again, the unmanaged, or excessive tension is experienced as behavioral stress. When we do things for others—give them things, make personal sacrifices for them—it can make us feel righteous, affectionate, loving. But we do want a payback. That’s the tug of self-interest. It can be very slight, hardly noticeable at first. But let the giving, the self-sacrifice, go on for a while, unacknowledged or unappreciated (i.e., without payback to the ego), and see how we begin to feel. The tension, the stress, starts to show. We complain that others are taking advantage of us, taking us for granted, victimizing us. Self-interest cannot be long short-changed without demanding its due. We may eventually relieve the stress by blowing up at those we have been serving—accusing them of ingratitude, withdrawing our favors, or kicking them out of the house. Or we may sandbag the stress, letting it eat away at our dispositions, our bodies. On the other hand, when we do things for others, they often feel obliged to return the favor in some form to avoid being left with an uneasy sense

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of debt. Gift-giving notoriously stimulates the receiver to feel the need to reciprocate. Think of the times when you have received a holiday gift from someone for whom you had failed to buy a gift. Sometimes the sense of obligation prompted by the empathetic acts of others can become a nuisance. The third rule statement describes the relative balance between the contending motives: 3. Behavior in the range of dynamic balance expresses the approximate balance of ego and empathy. It is the position of least behavioral tension. Within ourselves and others, it creates feelings of mutuality and shared respect. For most of us it’s an especially satisfying experience to interact with others in equality, with no sense of obligation, superiority, or inferiority. To work together in common humanity, in common cause, is to experience behavioral dynamic balance. Of course, there are many versions of the experience of dynamic balance: the shared pride of parents in helping their child achieve, the joy of athletes in playing well as a team, the satisfaction of coworkers in working together successfully on an important project. The Reciprocal Nature of Behavior These algorithms of behavior operate in the smallest interactions of everyday personal life. The dynamic of behavioral tension provides that for every interpersonal act, there is a balancing reciprocal. A self-interested act requires an empathetic reciprocal for balance. An empathetic act, likewise, requires a balancing self-interested reciprocal. This reciprocity goes back and forth many times even in a short conversation. Without the reciprocal, tension builds, stress accumulates, and either confrontation or withdrawal results. If not, and the relationship continues, it becomes a tense and stressful one of inequality or domination/submission, waiting and pressing for the opportunity for adjustment. These algorithms show how we get to reciprocity through conflict. They shape the conflict and reciprocity, the give-and-take, at all levels of our interactive, social lives. Overemphasis on either self-interest or empathy, exercise of one program to the exclusion of the other, creates tension and stress in any social configuration—from simple dyadic person-to-person encounters up to and including interactions among members of the workplace, society at large, social groups, and entire economic and political systems. Variability of the Reciprocal Algorithms The algorithmic rules of reciprocal behavior, operate as central tendencies of behavior. They also show considerable individual variability. They cannot

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work as precisely as the laws of classical physics or even quantum mechanics because they are achieved through the process of organic evolution that involves some random processes and natural selection. Gender, developmental, and experiential differences also contribute to variability (Cory, 1999: 42–44). This variability and lack of absolute precision is generally true of biological algorithms (e.g., see Maynard Smith, 2002). Reciprocity: The Universal Norm The norm of reciprocity expressing our social neural architecture has long been a major theme in anthropology and sociology (e.g., see Gouldner, 1960; van Baal, 1975; Bowles and Gintis, 1998: esp. ch. 17) and more recently in economics (e.g., Fehr and Gachter, 2000). This universally observed norm, found in all societies, primitive and modern, has been accounted for, or shown to be possible, in evolutionary theory by such concepts as kin selection, inclusive fitness (Hamilton, 1963, 1964), reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971, 1981; Alexander, 1987), and game theory (Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981; Maynard Smith, 1982). These efforts draw upon so-called genecentered perspectives, which see such reciprocity as basically selfish. More recently extensive reciprocity seen as based not upon selfishness, but empathy, has been reportedly observed in the behavior of rhesus monkeys (de Waal, 1996). de Waal’s approach is a welcome departure that tries to escape the selfishness of gene-centered approaches and looks to the implied motivational mechanisms. All these approaches, however, to include that of de Waal’s, have been based on the external observation of behavior. They have not attempted to identify or even speculate upon the neural mechanisms within the organism that must necessarily have been selected for by the evolutionary process to accomplish the functions of motivating, maintaining, and rewarding such observed reciprocal behavior. According to the CSN model of our neural architecture, reciprocity through conflict is achieved in the range of dynamic balance where behavioral tension operating freely tends to pull us. In dynamic balance, ego and empathy provide for the emergence of cooperation and fairness, trust and morality, in interpersonal, social activities. Taking the dynamic balance range to be approaching or approximating the equilibrium of ego and empathy as driven by behavioral tension, we can derive a formula that expresses this dynamic. The Equation of Sociality The reciprocal algorithms emerging from our social neural architecture have been illustrated graphically by the three major ranges of social behavior (refer

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back to figure 10.3). They have also been written in plain English by the section describing their interactive dynamic. I can now state them in the form of the equation of sociality: BT ⫽

Ego ⫽ ⫾ 1 (dynamic balance, approx. equilibrium or unity) Empathy

In the formula BT stands for behavioral tension and is a function of the ratio of ego to empathy or vice versa. Either ego or empathy can serve as the numerator or denominator to avoid the inconvenience of fractions. This equation gives basic mathematical expression to the social architecture of our evolved brain structure. As the conflicting modules of our social architecture approach equilibrium or dynamic balance (represented by the symbolic approximation to unity or dynamic balance, ⫾ 1), behavioral tension/stress are minimized. On the other hand, as the ratios diverge increasingly toward the extremes of ego or empathy, behavioral tension increases. That is, if we have an empathy magnitude of 8 and an ego magnitude of 4, or vice-versa, we have a behavioral tension magnitude of 2. At a minimum the neural dynamic serves generally to keep our social behavior, homeostatically, within survival limits, which accounts for its Darwinian selection. On the other hand, at the level of optimal functioning, the algorithms, driven by behavioral tension, tend to move us toward dynamic balance of ego and empathy or self and other interest; that is, balanced reciprocity, or equality. The formula, therefore, is very simple, but deceptively so, because it can be quite variable and can ramify in many ways. Hamilton’s Rule, Inclusive Fitness and the Equation of Sociality W. D. Hamilton (1964), in his kin selection model, formalized the issue of how genes for cooperation and altruism could evolve in his kin selection model. The core of this inclusive fitness model is that it weighs the effect of genes not only on the individual that carries them but also on kin individuals who share the same genes. According to what has come to be called Hamilton’s rule, genes coding for cooperation, reciprocity, or altruism could evolve if the costs of cooperative behavior to the individual were outweighed by the benefits to related individuals carrying the same genes. Hamilton’s rule is expressed varyingly as rb ⫺ c ⬎ 0 or c ⬍ rb

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In this formula r is the coefficient or degree of relatedness or kin, b is the benefit of the cooperative or altruistic behavior to the kin, and c is the cost of the behavior to the individual. The equation predicts that as r (relatedness) increases, benefits will exceed costs and cooperation, reciprocity, or altruism would be favored by natural selection. Hamilton’s rule gives the basic formula for inclusive fitness from the external gene’s eye view. Hamilton did not speculate on the actual mechanisms created by the genes to motivate and/or sustain such behavior. The formula of our social architecture derived from the CSN model expresses this motivating mechanism and establishes linkage with Hamilton’s formula. The sociality formula can, in fact, be expressed in the same cost/benefit terms that Hamilton uses. Empathy can be considered the cost to the behaving individual, ego can be benefit to the survival requirements of the recipient. Substituting cost and benefit into the formula, we get the operational mechanism for Hamilton’s rule (see Cory, 1999: 97–100). BT ⫽

Benefit ⫽⫾1 Cost

In the algorithm of our social neural architecture, any empathetic, cooperative, or altruistic behavior will serve to improve the odds of survival of selfplus-others inclusively over purely egoistic or self-interested behavior. This is compatible with Hamilton’s rule, which says that as long as the benefit to related individuals exceeds the cost to the behaving individual, the genes supporting such behavior can be favored by natural selection. Of course, once the neural mechanism, the social architecture, is in place, the empathetic or altruistic behavior may be extended to nonkin—even to the universe itself— by appropriate education and socialization through the medium of language that draws upon, modifies, and elaborates the existing neural substrate (e.g., see Buss, 1999: 228). Evolutionary Psychiatry: Clinical and Social Implicatons Biological psychiatry/psychology has a substantial tradition and has provided many useful insights and concepts. Among these the pleasure principle emphasized by Freud (1911) and many others has been a mainstay of analytical as well as behavioral theory. More recently, from the ethological perspective, Michael Chance developed the hedonic/agonic conceptual approach, which also led to useful insights (1984, 1988). Evolutionary neuroscience goes hand in hand with the perspective of evolutionary ethology or the study of behavior across the range of animal species. Like others it is

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a Darwinian perspective. An emphasis on the ubiquitous presence of social hierarchy or dominance/submissive relationships is a hallmark of the ethological approach in animal studies. MacLean pioneered the study of brain circuitry substrating such behaviors. The term neuroethology, which encompasses the study of both brain and behavior from an evolutionary perspective, captures this combined focus well (Cory and Gardner, 2002). Over the past decades there has been a growing theoretical and clinical literature that proceeds from this combined perspective. Neither Freud’s approach nor Chance’s concept, however, handle the issue of hierarchy adequately. Freud did not tie his thought definitively to evolved neural architecture and was only marginally concerned with hierarchy. Chance proceeded primarily from an externalized ethological perspective and did not make full use of the evidence from evolutionary neuroscience. Let’s see how the reciprocal algorithms and the formula developed from them provides a useful alternative organizing concept for current thinking on hierarchy or dominance/ submissive relationships in psychotherapeutic theory. First, a little background. British psychiatrist John Price (1967) initiated the present effort to incorporate the concept of hierarchy into human psychotherapy from the ethological perspective by introducing his theory of the dominance hierarchy and the evolution of mental illness. American psychiatrist theorist, Russell Gardner (1982), carried the effort forward in his ethological approach to the mechanism of manic-depressive disorder. Other scholars took up the call and contributed to more fully developing the social competition hypothesis of depression (Price et al., 1994). An important insight emerged from these efforts. The earlier vertebrate circuitry common to fishes, amniotes, and reptiles (MacLean’s protoreptilian complex), which scripted self-preserving, often life and death contests for dominance, became integrated with the attachment or affectional circuitry of mammals (see also Wilson, 1993; cf. Rothstein and Pierotti, 1988; EiblEibesfeldt, 1989: esp. 168–169). This combined circuitry permitted the emergence of social competition—the tug and pull of ego and empathy that is captured in the CSN model and substrated by MacLean’s triune modular concept. Dominance modified by affection leading to cognitively emergent empathy became possible among higher primates and humans. Although dominance, without engagement of affectional mechanisms, could still be a life and death all or nothing contest, hierarchy could now be achieved through alliances, serving and preserving others by engaging affectional circuitry. Submission could be accepted and integrated into the social fabric. Conflict resolution, as we currently practice it in our behavioral, social, and management sciences, thus, became possible.

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Of course, the behavioral tension motivating the contests remained; the tug and pull of self-preservation and affection, ego and empathy, persisted latently or covertly to drive later changes in the hierarchy when the supporting contingencies and/or relative prowess of the contestants changed. Thus, human hierarchies, like those of other mammals and primates (e.g., see de Waal, 1992, 1996; Sapolsky, 1992: 315–319; Boehm, 1999) are inherently unstable because of the latent or potential behavioral tension. Depending on the degree of social, economic, or political inequalities, they must be held in place by institutions, ideologies, and/or police or military power. Generally, however, the integration of self-preservation with affection, allowed the survival of subordinated others and their inclusion in the social fabric. The mitigation of the life and death struggle by mammalian attachment circuitry, likely spurred higher cortical evolution (cf. Humphrey, 1976; Erdal and Whiten, 1996; Cummins, 1998), making possible the development of complex societies and a population success or explosion of about 6 billion for the human species. The institutions of democratic participation and economic upward mobility implicitly recognize the behavioral tension underlying the instability of human hierarchy. At minimum they allow institutional vents for the tension, promoting social stability amidst social change. At best they lead us toward a minimizing of social inequality. Implications The analysis proposed here links Hamilton’s externalized gene’s eye rule with the CSN model and formula from evolutionary neuroscience, which, in turn, unites the phenomena of social hierarchy with the clinical concepts of social competition, depression and mania, and the issues of dominance/ submission, inequality, and equality. Such a linkage has significant implications not only for the unification of evolutionary psychology (which relies essentially upon Hamilton’s rule of inclusive fitness) with evolutionary neuroscience but also indicates the integration of the latter disciplines with the mental healing sciences as well as the social sciences. Basic to the mental healing and social sciences is the question of how we rear our children to facilitate the full development of the genetically selected affectional and survival mechanisms that underlie the emergence of the cognitive expressions of empathy and ego (as healthy self-esteem). Although such researchers as Jean Piaget (1965) of Switzerland and Lawrence Kohlberg (1984) of Harvard tend to see these qualities as emerging through participation in any normal family life—perhaps because the reciprocity of such family life approximates the environment of evolutionary adaptation—our complex and often fragmented modern society offers many opportunities for

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failure. Should we then leave this all-important socialization to the now somewhat chancy contingencies of modern family life? Our findings indicate that children should be reared in loving circumstances and encouraged by socialization, education, and example to achieve an essential balance of these dynamic motives that leads to the emergence of a sense of justice as well as a sense of the universal equality of human value. Emotional learning, by reinforcing expression of gene-specified architecture differentially, can mean a child’s self becomes egoistic and domineering, fearful and negative, or empathetic and optimistic (cf. LeDoux, 2002: 322). For example, the recent review by Meaney (2001) reports the effects of maternal care on gene expression in offspring. That is, what mothers do affects the ongoing expression of genes in their developing offspring. I suggest that, as a matter of public policy, we need to deliberately encourage this development consistently through family education, public and private schools, and through our social and political institutions. The multidisciplinary linkages reported in this chapter also provide insights for the understanding, guidance, and management of our social, economic, and political systems. Such linkages suggest these systems should reinforce the earlier socialization of family, schools, religious institutions, et al. In other works I have presented the case for linkage with the so-called economic laws of supply and demand, social stratification, and political theory using the same equation of our social architecture (Cory, 1999, 2000a,b, 2001a,b) and cannot further develop it here. Based upon the findings of evolutionary neuroethology, a research committee called the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry has recommended recently that the proper framework for the science of psychiatry should be the social brain (Gardner, 2002). With the social brain at the center, psychiatry, psychology, and the related healing sciences may find themselves stepping inevitably deeper into the socioeconomic and political arenas. As the reciprocal algorithms of evolved neural architecture serve minimally to keep our behaviors within survival limits, they further tend, driven by behavioral tension, to push us toward socioeconomic and political equality. Perhaps they also account for the explicitly stated but strangely unsourced desire for human harmony (and happiness) expressed by sociobiologist John Alcock (2001: 215) and evolutionist George C. Williams (1996: 153–154). Perhaps the reciprocal algorithms, as they tend to dynamic balance, also provide biological underpinning for the cherished egalitarian values expressed by many defenders of SSSM. Perhaps, then, the ultimate meaning of inclusive fitness for our species via the dynamic of our evolved social architecture may be the affirmation of us all in essential equality of human value—of unity in diversity. This seems the only feasible route to the

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relatively tension-free or dynamically balanced social harmony we desire. Proceeding from such a perspective, we would honor our differences and build a society to accommodate them, not distort these differences to fit an ill-conceived survival-of-the-fittest-framework. Specifically, we would avoid the tension-laden social negatives of eugenics and other forms of social Darwinism—whatever guise they may take. Perhaps our biological, healing, and social sciences should all join hands in confronting the questions that have long preoccupied political theorists. That is: what is the good society? And how shall we go about achieving it on a local as well as worldwide scale? In the aftermath of the events of September 2001 such age-old questions become even more salient and pressing. Our biological inheritance—our social brain architecture—not only provides us with the motive (i.e., the desire) to create the good society, it also provides us with the mechanism to achieve it. References Alcock, J. (2001). The Triumph of Sociobiology. New York: Oxford University Press. Alexander, R. (1987). The Biology of Moral Systems. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Axelrod, R. and W. Hamilton. (1981). The evolution of cooperation. Science 211: 1390. Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bowles, S. and H. Gintis. (1998). Recasting Egalitarianism. London: Verso. Buss, David M. (1999). Evolutionary Psychology. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Chance, M. R. A. (1984). Biological systems synthesis of mentality and the nature of the two modes of mental operation: Hedonic and agonic. Man-Environment Systems 14: 143–157. Chance, M. R. A. (Ed.). (1988). Social Fabrics of the Mind. Hilldale, NJ: Erlbaum. Cory, G. A., Jr. (1999). The Reciprocal Modular Brain in Economics and Politics. New York: Plenum. Cory, G. A., Jr. (2000a). From MacLean’s triune brain concept to the conflict systems neurobehavioral model. Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science 35: 385–414. Cory, G. A., Jr. (2000b). Toward Consilience: The Bioneurological Basis of Thought, Behavior, Language, and Experience. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Cory, G. A., Jr. (2001a). Neural network theory and neuroscience: Applications to socio-economic theory. Presented at the Meeting on Socio-Economics, University of Amsterdam. Cory, G. A., Jr. (2001b). Transaction costs, the firm and evolved neural architecture. Presented at the Conference of the Western Economic Association International, San Francisco. Cory, G. A., Jr. (2002). Neural algorithms, Hamilton’ rule, and the invisible hand of economics. In G. Cory and R. Gardner (Eds.), The Evolutionary Neuroethology of Paul MacLean. Convergences and Frontiers. Westport, CT: Praeger.

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Cory, G. A. Jr. and R. Gardner, Jr. (Eds.). (2002). The Evolutionary Neuroethology of Paul MacLean: Convergences and Frontiers. Westport, CT: Praeger. Cummins, D. (1998). Social norms and other minds: The evolutionary roots of higher cognition. In D. Cummins and C. Allen (Eds.), The Evolution of Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes Error. New York: Grosset/Putnam. Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens. New York: Harcourt. de Waal, F. (1992). Coalitions as part of reciprocal relations in the Arnheim chimpanzee colony. In A. H. Harcourt and F. de Waal (Eds.), Coalitions and Alliances in Humans and Other Animals. New York: Oxford University Press. de Waal, F. (1996). Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1989). Human Ethology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Erdal, D. and A. Whiten. (1996). Egalitarianism and Machiavellian intelligence in human evolution. In P. Mellars and K. Gibson (Eds.), Modelling the Early Human Mind. Cambridge: The McDonald Institute, University of Cambridge. Fehr, E. and S. Gachter. (2000). Fairness and retaliation: The Economics of reciprocity. Journal of Economic Perspectives 4: 159–181. Freud, S. (1911). Formulations regarding the two principles in mental functioning. In Collected Papers, vol. IV, pp. 13–21 (trans. by M. Searl). London: The Hogarth Press (1946). Fuster, J. (1999). Cognitive functions of the frontal lobes. In B. Miller and J. Cummings (Eds.), The Human Frontal Lobes. New York: The Guilford Press. Gardner, R. (1982). Mechanisms in major depressive disorder: An evolutionary model. Archives of General Psychiatry 39: 1436–1441. Gardner, R. (2002). MacLean’s Paradigm and Its Relevance for Psychiatry’s Basic Science. In G. Cory and R. Gardner, (Eds.), The Evolutionary Neuroethology of Paul MacLean: Convergences and Frontiers. Westport, CT: Praeger. Goldberg, E. (2001). The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Gouldner, A. (1960). The norm of reciprocity: A preliminary statement. American Sociological Review 25: 161–178. Hamilton, W. D. (1963). The evolution of altruistic behavior. American Naturalist 97: 354–356. Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behavior, I and II. Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 1–52. Humphrey, N. K. (1976). The function of the intellect. In P. P. G. Bateson and R. H. Hinde (Eds.), Growing Points in Ethology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kohlberg, L. (1984). The Psychology of Moral Development, vol. 2. San Francisco: Harper & Row. LeDoux, J. (2002). Synaptic Self. New York: Viking Penguin. Lieberman, P. (2000). Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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MacLean, P. D. (1990). The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions. New York: Plenum. Maynard Smith, J. (1982). The evolution of social behavior—a classification of models. In King’s College Sociobiology Group (Eds.), Current Problems in Sociobiology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maynard Smith, J. (2002). Equations of life. In G. Farmelo (Ed.), It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science. London: Granta Books. Meaney, M. (2001). Maternal care, gene expression, and the transmission of individual differences in stress reactivity across generations. Annual Review of Neuroscience 24: 1161–1192. Miller, B. and J. Cummings (Eds.). (1999). The Human Frontal Lobes. New York: The Guilford Press. Miller, E. K. and J. D. Cohen. (2001). An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience 24: 167–202. Panksepp, Jaak. (1998). Affective Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press. Panksepp, J. and J. B. Panksepp. (2000). The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology. Pp. 108–131 in Evolution and Cognition, V. 6, N. 2. Piaget, Jean. [1932] (1965). The Moral Judgement of the Child. New York: Free Press. Pribram, K. (1973). The primate frontal cortex—executive of the brain. In K. Pribram and A. Luria (Eds.), Psychophysiology of the Frontal Lobes. New York: Academic Press. Pribram, K. (1994). Brain and the structure of narrative. In D. Levine and M. Aparicio (Eds.), Neural Networks for Knowledge Representation and Inference. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum. Price, J. (1967). Hypothesis: The dominance hierarchy and the evolution of mental illness. Lancet 2: 243–246. Price, J., L. Sloman, R. Gardner, P. Gilbert, and P. Rhode. (1994). The social competition hypothesis of depression. British Journal of Psychiatry 164: 309–315. Rothstein, S. I. and R. Pierotti. (1988). Distinctions among reciprocal altruism, kin selection, and cooperation and a model for the initial evolution of beneficent behavior. Ethology and Sociobiology 9: 189–210. Sapolsky, R. (1992). Neuroendocrinology of the stress-response. In J. Becker, S. Breedlove, and D. Crews (Eds.), Behavioral Endocrinology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. The Quarterly Review of Biology 46: 35–57. Trivers, R. L. (1981). Sociobiology and politics. In E. White (Ed.), Sociobiology and Human Politics. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath & Company. van Baal, J. (1975). Reciprocity and the Position of Women. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, Assen. Williams, G. (1996). The Pony Fish’s Glow. New York: Basic Books. Wilson, D. R. (1993). Evolutionary epidemiology: Darwinian theory in the service of medicine and psychiatry. Acta Biotheoretica 41: 205–218.

CHAPTER 11

Altruism and Good Samaritan Law John Strate

The Problem of Rescue

T

he parable of the Good Samaritan is 2000 years old.1 The parable and its moral lessons have inspired countless reflections over the centuries by theologians, preachers, legal scholars, philosophers, judges, politicians, and ordinary citizens. Intermittently, we are reminded of the potential for citizens to ignore the plight of others. An example is the case of David Cash, who expressed no remorse for his failure to intervene to save the life of a seven-year-old girl being raped and strangled by his high school friend Jeremy Strohmeyer in a casino restroom (Ridolfi, 2000). Intermittently, citizens are also reminded of their potential for heroic action in rescue, as at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The capacity of human beings either for good or for evil seems almost boundless. The practical problems of rescue, however, are an everyday occurrence, and are the focus of this chapter. Situations that demand rescue are commonplace. Some of these situations are the result of accidents. Across the country, everyday, there are thousands of injuries that require immediate medical attention. In 2000, for example, motor vehicle crashes resulted in 3,189,000 injuries.2 A study of injuries in New York State over the 1990–1992 period calculated hospitalization rates per 100,000 people due to injuries.3 The highest rate, 348.0, was recorded for falls. Other rates included motor vehicle crash (93.5), self-inflicted injuries (50.0), struck by an object/person (30.6), pedestrian (27.2), poisoning (27.0), cutting instrument (22.6), overexertion (19.1), scalding (13.9), bicyclist (12.5), machinery

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(7.9), fire/flame (5.4), unintentional firearm (6.1), respiratory interference (5.0), and submersion (1.1). Other situations are the result of critical health conditions. Across the country, everyday, there are thousands of persons whose lives are threatened by heart attack, stroke, diabetic shock, and other health care conditions. In 1998 there were an estimated 1,100,000 coronary attacks resulting in 459,841 deaths. About 10,430,000 people have physician-diagnosed diabetes. In 1998, about 513,000 individuals were hospitalized because of diabetes. Also in 1998, 600,000 people had a new or recurrent stroke, and of these 158,448 died.4 Many crimes result in injury. In 1998, the crime rate index for murder was 6.3 per 100,000; it was 34.4 for forcible rape, 165.2 for robbery, and 360.5 for aggravated assault.5 Still other situations involve hazards and require rescue for the avoidance of injury. Climbers, hikers, and hunters become lost. People inside a building that is on fire may have no ready means of escape. In 1999, 2,895 fire deaths and 16,425 fire injuries occurred in 383,000 residential fires in the United States.6 People may cling to a boat that has capsized. Young children are out of sight of a parent or guardian may wander into the street, walk out on thin ice, or wade in a pond or stream near a drop off. To illustrate the kinds of rescue situations that might arise in a large city, I analyzed 911 calls in the City of Detroit for the year 2000. The city’s population was 951,270. Among large cities in the United States, Detroit may be at the upper tail of the distribution in terms of numbers of 911 calls per capita, given the magnitude of its social problems and its crime rate. Nevertheless, 911 calls in the city do reflect the overall magnitude of the rescue problem in one city. As table 11.1 shows, 911 calls in the City of Detroit in year 2000 numbered 710,060 (1,940 per day, 0.75 per capita). Calls about property crimes, which typically do not involve rescue situations, numbered 122,672 (335 per day, 0.13 per capita). Calls about violent crime numbered 68,826 (188 per day, 0.07 per capita), about family trouble 156,981 (429 per day, 0.17 per capita), about neighborhood problems 247,987 (678 per day, 0.26 per capita) and about accidents and hazards 113,594 (310 per day, 0.12 per capita). Rescue efforts generally are more effective if they occur sooner rather than later. For injuries and medical emergencies, basic first aid and emergency medical services will be more effective if they occur sooner rather than later. For situations that require rescue to avoid injury, the chances of injury typically increase with time. For situations that involve violent crime, intervention by witnesses and quick police response may prevent serious injury and

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Table 11.1 911 Calls in Detroit, 2000 Number Property crime Breaking and Entering Larceny Auto related Destruction of property Financial crimes Subtotal

43,175 9,201 57,467 11,089 1,740 122,672

Violent crime Homicide Sex crimes Robbery and extortion Assault Kidnapping Subtotal

105 7,532 24,573 35,364 1,252 68,826

Percentage 6.1 1.3 8.1 1.6 0.2 17.3 0.0⫹ 1.1 3.5 5.0 0.2 9.7

Family trouble Suicide and death Assault Property Children Subtotal

6,227 85,902 46,387 18,465 156,981

0.9 12.1 6.5 2.6 22.1

Neighborhood problems Narcotics Autos Disturbances Persons Animals Rubbish and litter Subtotal

15,706 19,756 105,189 95,531 10,056 1, 749 247,987

2.2 2.8 14.8 13.5 1.4 0.2 34.9

Accidents and Hazards Auto related Fire and explosion Person down and medical Miscellaneous Subtotal

74,575 3,962 32,994 2,063 113,594

10.5 0.6 4.6 0.3 16.0

Total

710,060

100.0

Note: Table excludes crime alarm calls, police housekeeping calls, and uncodeable calls. Source: City of Detroit.

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even death. Again, everything else equal, rescue efforts that occur sooner rather than later are more likely to be successful. Many citizens have received training in first-aid and life-saving techniques and such training has saved many lives. This is a partial solution, but today in urban areas rescue often means sophisticated technology including 911 service, and police, fire, and emergency medical services. The value of such technology, however, depends upon citizens intervening and at a minimum reporting rescue situations to authorities. Problems of Uncertainty and Risk Rescue situations vary in uncertainty and risk. Uncertainty refers to unpredictable (and unknowable) elements of a situation. For example, an adult who sees another person slumped on the sidewalk may not know whether the person is drunk, suffering from a seizure, having a heart attack, or is unconscious because of some other condition. Risk refers to an element of the situation to which a probability can be assigned. For example, a physician can conduct a diagnosis of a patient’s injury and determine the risk to the patient, if any, of not treating them right away. Persons also approach rescue situations with varying levels of competence and motivation. For example, the average citizen lacks first-aid training and when they come upon an injured person may not know the nature of the injury and what to do about it. An emergency medical technician, however, will likely know after a short time at the scene exactly what needs to be done. Although rescue that occurs sooner rather than later is likely to be more effective, because of variation in rescue situations and people’s competence and motivation to rescue, this goal is difficult to realize. For example, what should an adult do who sees child, seemingly unsupervised, wading into a lake outside a designated swimming area? No lifeguard is visible, but other things are uncertain. The adult may guess that a parent or guardian, out of their view, is watching the child. Perhaps it is shallow outside the designated area and it is safe to swim there. Perhaps the child is a good swimmer. Perhaps if a warning were given, the child would ignore it. The adult might also be uncertain about attempting rescue, should the child appear to be drowning—they may not be a good swimmer or be practiced in artificial respiration. Furthermore, the adult may have other duties to attend to, such as watching their own young children. The common law tradition supports the practical view that rescue situations are far too variable and involve far too many uncertainties to require any general duty to rescue (Pardun, 1998).


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As another example, what should professional rescuers do when hikers are trapped on a mountain in bad weather. If the hikers did not leave an itinerary and do not have a cell phone with them, rescuers may need to conduct a search. Rescuers exercise professional judgment in such cases and may refuse to take a risk even though the likelihood of a successful rescue is diminished. Social Science Perspectives on Rescue Theories based upon the standard social science model (SSSM) have not successfully accounted for rescue behavior. This model posits the human brain is largely a blank slate (i.e., extreme neuronal plasticity) upon which culture, through the mechanism of social learning, writes its script. Social learning requires tangible, external reinforcement. Social behavior that is rewarded tends to increase in frequency; that which is not rewarded or is punished tends to be extinguished. In this view, therefore, altruism including rescue behavior must involve social learning that has been rewarded. Such a view, however, leads to a paradox. Altruism, by definition is costly. The apparent lack of positive reinforcement makes altruism difficult to explain (Paloutzian, 1979). To escape this paradox, some learning theorists have proposed the existence of “intrinsic” rewards or self-reinforcement (see Rosenhan, 1972). Through socialization, individuals have acquired the capacity (e.g., a sense of empathy, a sense of social responsibility) to be reinforced by intrinsic rewards. Presumably, these intrinsic rewards somehow compensate for altruism’s costs. An example of learning theory is “equity theory.” This theory identifies the rewards and punishments associated with rescue behavior (Walster and Piliavin, 1972). It argues that social groups evolve accepted systems for fairly apportioning rewards and costs among members. They reward members who treat others fairly and punish individuals who treat others unfairly. An equitable relationship exists when participants are receiving equal relative outcomes from a relationship (167). The value of this approach is its focus upon such variables as the cost of helping and the adequacy of available equity restoring techniques. The theory is applicable, however, only where a person thinking about rescue perceives that a relationship exists with the victim. In cases where a person does not know the victim, it is unclear why they would perceive a relationship to exist. In spite of working with seemingly poor theory, social scientists have made contributions to a practical understanding of various factors that either promote or inhibit rescue. The most active period of research on rescue occurred in the aftermath of the notorious Kitty Genovese murder in

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New York City on March 13, 1964. The focus was upon factors related to helpers, victims, and situations. Most everyone, social scientist and average citizen, wanted an answer to the following: why did 38 of Kitty Genovese’s neighbors in Kew Gardens who were witnesses to her screams for help outside their apartment building fail over a half-hour period around 3 A.M. to directly intervene and/or call police? The social psychologists Latané and Darley (1970), setting aside general questions about human altruism, conducted a series of experiments in an effort to answer the question of what determines in a particular situation whether one person will help another. The decision to rescue, they argued, involves a series of decisions. A person first needs to know that something is wrong and if the event is an emergency or not. They next need to decide on their degree of personal responsibility for helping. If they feel responsible, they next need to decide how to deal with the situation. After this decision, carrying out the intervention itself may be difficult because of stress and the urgency generated by the emergency (35). Perhaps the most interesting finding of their research was that helping behavior decreased and was slower in coming with an increase in the number of bystanders present. The authors argued that this occurs because people view others as an audience and are reluctant to do something foolish, because others serve as guides to behavior, whether this involves action or not, and because the presence of others dilutes the responsibility to act (125). A key factor appears to be the ambiguity of the rescue situation. When the rescue situation is ambiguous, as in some of Latané and Darcy’s experiments, individuals look for cues from other bystanders in order to understand what’s going on and what should be done. In unambiguous rescue situations, however, individuals can quickly consider their responsibility to act, either alone or jointly, and decide to act or not act on that basis. For example, an individual may decide to “take charge” of the situation and assign responsibilities to other bystanders. Another finding of this research was that the existence of a relationship between an individual and a victim greatly increases the likelihood of rescue, as would be expected based either upon notions of duty and/or reciprocity. This is not surprising. For example, we expect that an individual if at all possible will try to rescue a friend. The characteristics of the victim also matter. Victims who appear to be responsible for their own plight (e.g., a drunk) are less likely to receive help. Females are more likely to receive help than males (Latané and Darley, 1970) Many researchers have explored the characteristics of rescuers. In general, personality characteristics are not associated with rescue (e.g., Latané and


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Darley, 1970; Darley and Batson, 1973), although weak correlations can be found between specific personality characteristics and specific types of altruism (cf. Gergen et al., 1972). There also appears to be little relationship between a pro-social personality and rescue, probably because rescue situations vary so much. In one experiment subjects were presented with the opportunity of helping a stranger while they were hurrying to deliver a talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan. Many walked right by, presumably because of their other “compelling” duty (Darley and Batson, 1973; cf. Greenwald, 1975). Studies have found several individual characteristics to be associated with crime intervention. Interveners are more likely to be men. They also are more likely to report various forms of training that would be helpful in such interventions (e.g., life saving, self-defense and karate, police training) (Geis and Huston, 1983). Bystander intervention in criminal situations is related to onlookers and their attitudes toward crime, criminals, and the police (Huston et al., 1976). What is the relevance of social norms? Cohen (1972) argues that a universal psychology supports reciprocity but not generalized altruism. Empathy for all humans does not exist in many cultures and may only exist in complex cultures that nurture the emotional development necessary to activate such altruism. The influence of social norms in emergency situations is probably weakened by the communications of bystanders at the scene relevant to the specific situation at hand (Staub, 1972). Rescues and Human Nature: Biological Theories of Altruism The SSSM has generated findings about rescue but is arguably deficient because it is not based upon a sound understanding of human nature. Such an understanding should help us to better understand rescues and in turn improve public policies with respect to rescues. The biological sciences alone speak to the question of the evolutionary origins of altruism and its adaptive significance. This literature suggests that altruism is multifaceted. It involves a variety of behaviors with different origins and adaptive significances. The human brain, although it possesses a high degree of neuronal plasticity, is not a blank slate. Rather, the human brain is modular with specialized circuits designed to solve recurrent problems confronted by our evolutionary ancestors (Buss, 1999). More recent changes to the human brain are due to natural selection occurring over the last 120,000 years since Homo sapiens first expanded out of Africa. What were the occasions for

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rescue (or occasions for altruism) in the hunter-gatherer societies that prevailed exclusively over all but the last 10,000 years of this time period? An answer to this question should contribute to a better understanding of rescue. Many of the rescue situations that our hunter-gatherer ancestors confronted were quite likely quite similar to those confronted by people today. For example, injuries from accidents and violence were likely commonplace in hunter-gatherer society. Many rescue situations that modern humans confront, however, were rarely encountered by hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers were not injured in auto accidents or by firearms. They were seldom if ever in a crowd of strangers witnessing somebody needing medical assistance. The concept of reaction range is useful in understanding variation in behavior. Almost all complex behaviors are constrained by developmental pathways that define a reaction range (Masters, 1989). As a simple example, Nolan Ryan, through years of training, strengthened his arm to such an extent that he could throw a baseball more than 150 kph. In his 40s, however, he requires painkillers to ease the pain of arthritis. Average men, who are not professional baseball players, and have never trained, can manage to throw a baseball at perhaps half that speed. Social behavior is constrained by developmental pathways just like other behaviors. An example is learning a new language, which becomes increasingly difficult after the age of puberty. What developmental pathways are relevant to the reaction range for rescues? Nobody knows for sure. All rescues involve “altruism” defined broadly as behavior that is performed for the benefit of others. It is not especially meaningful, however, to talk about a reaction range for altruism, because altruism embraces so many different kinds of behavior. At least five theories have been set out to account for altruism. Each of the theories implies something distinctive about altruism and its expression in humans. A major distinction is whether or not altruism is directed toward relatives, toward group members, or toward others.

Kin Selection Theory Set out with mathematical rigor by William D. Hamilton (1996), this theory identifies the “gene” as the most effective level of natural selection. Individuals share genes with their relatives that are identical by descent. Accordingly, individuals can transmit genes to subsequent generations either through their own reproduction or by giving aid to relatives in ways that increase their reproduction. “Inclusive fitness” is a measure of the individual’s success in this regard. In ordinary language, much of altruism amounts to


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nepotism in the forms of parental care and other kinds of aid given to descendant and non-descendant relatives. Hundreds of studies have tested and confirmed hypotheses based upon Hamilton’s theory for both animals and humans. Few doubt that the largest portion of human behavior that is performed for the benefit of others is targeted toward relatives. This was as surely true of hunter-gatherer societies as it is true today of modern societies. Mothers and fathers clothed, fed, nurtured, and protected their children. The relevance of this for rescue behavior is plain. It is likely to discriminate between relatives and non-relatives, favoring relatives. For example, all political communities recognize that parents have a special obligation to protect their own children from hazards; but they do not have an obligation to protect other people’s children unless, of course, those children are under their supervision. Although kin-selection theory may account for most behavior that is performed for the benefit of others, it is not sufficient. Some behavior in humans, especially in modern societies, clearly is performed for the benefit of non-relatives. Genetic Similarity Theory This is an extension of kin-selection theory. It proposes that individuals are able to discriminate between those who are close to themselves genetically and those who are not (Rushton, 1989). Such discrimination is presumably easier if it involves a physical trait with high habitability that gives a more reliable cue of genetic similarity. Skin color or other features linked with ethnicity/race might be examples. This theory subsumes kinship theory and implies that rescue behavior will again discriminate and likely favor not only relatives but also those of similar appearance. An objection to this theory is that kin-selection should be sufficiently effective to prevent the extension of altruism to broader categories of unrelated (even though genetically similar) targets. Another objection is that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were unlikely to frequently interact with people who were greatly different in appearance from themselves. Direct Reciprocity The old adage “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” describes a situation where both parties can benefit from an exchange. Formally, such situations amount to the Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Both parties do well if they scratch each other’s back. However, both parties also are tempted to receive a back scratch but not return the favor. Repeated games of Prisoner’s

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Dilemma are most effectively played using the tit-for-tat strategy whereby the player cooperates on the first move and plays exactly as the other player did on his/her last move (Axelrod, 1984). Players reciprocate only if the other player does. In ordinary social exchanges, where people make occasional mistakes, a social learning strategy such as Pavlov (“stick with what works, change what doesn’t”) may do somewhat better than tit-for-tat. The study of social exchange has a long history in the social sciences (e.g., Homans, 1961). Trivers (1971) was one of the first to outline its evolutionary basis. Direct reciprocity theory suggests that rescue of unrelated individuals will be limited to those with the capacity and desire to reciprocate. Rescue is most likely of unrelated individuals who are known to have reciprocated in the past. A person would come to the aid of a neighbor and friend injured in a fall at home. Rescue is least likely of unrelated and unknown persons who are judged incapable of or unlikely to reciprocate. As an example, bystanders on a city street may be unlikely to rescue a drunk in tattered clothing who has fallen into the gutter. Indirect Reciprocity Theory Proposed by Alexander (1979), this theory proposes that altruism may be reciprocated, but indirectly, by third parties who were not its direct beneficiaries. Many acts of altruism are public goods. In some cases, an entire society may benefit from an act of altruism (e.g., acts of heroism in warfare, donations of scientific discoveries). In other cases, even though only a single person happens to benefit from an act of altruism (e.g., a rescue), the entire society benefits indirectly from the presence of altruists because of the higher likelihood of rescue. Altruists are privileged “groups” that supply public goods. Altruists and their relatives are reciprocated indirectly by third parties. For example, rewards are commonly bestowed by the leaders of political communities to warriors who have demonstrated heroism in battle, such as rescuing a comrade from certain death. This theory suggests that rescues may be more probable in societies that have established mechanisms to reward such acts of altruism. Rewards may be symbolic (plaques, ribbons) or monetary and go directly to the rescuer or to their relatives. An example is the organized public response in the United States to help out the families of firefighters who were killed and injured in the terrorist attack that led to the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Group Selection Theory This is the most controversial theory that has been set out to account for altruism. Several different theoretical models requiring exacting conditions


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have been developed to show that group selection is feasible (Sober and Wilson, 1998). Some of these conditions appear to exist for some species in nature, but group selection has not been proven and is perhaps unlikely in the evolution of Homo sapiens. Models of group selection generally specify that individuals engaging in altruism suffer from losses in inclusive fitness. It thus involves “hard core” altruism. Group selection does not require reciprocation, unlike direct reciprocity. Group selection theory implies that individuals will rescue members of their own social group but will not rescue members of other social groups. It implies a social group in which there is ample “good deed doing” but the norm prevails that “no good deed should go unpunished.” A rescuer would neither ask for nor expect reciprocation. Social norms would make it wrong to either offer it or accept it. Such altruism may be outside the reaction range of average humans. Homo sapiens are subsocial, not eusocial like colonial animals. Utopias that have demanded such a level of self-sacrifice on the part of their members have always disintegrated. Sexual Selection Theory This theory, although it was not set out to account for altruism, has implications for rescue. The theory was first set out by Darwin in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1981). According to an updated version of this theory, in most species, variance in male reproductive success is greater than variance in female reproductive success. Males pursue risky strategies and if successful they benefit by attaining substantially higher reproductive success than other males. Sexual selection may lead to costly signaling. A well-known example is the male peacock’s tail. The more magnificent the male’s tail, the better his health. Female peacocks prefer to mate with such males. It is to their advantage to do so because their own sons will also be healthy. Costly signaling may also involve behavior. For example, young men signal their quality as a potential mate by excelling in team sports, by showing heroism in battle, by helping those too weak to defend themselves, and by engaging in dangerous rescues. It is known that women, in seeking a long-term mate, show a preference for men who are tall, strong, and can display physical prowess, probably because of the physical protection that such men can offer (Buss, 1999). There is ample evidence that men are more likely than others to engage in dangerous rescues. They are more likely than others to intervene to stop

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crime and aid the victims of crime (Geis and Huston, 1983). They often go to the aid of women who are being assaulted by their partners. Men more than women are attracted to rescue occupations that demand courage including police officer, firefighter, emergency medical service technician, and search and rescue crews (Lois, 1999). They are attracted to military service. The occupations of police officer and fire fighter are organized along para-military lines, suggesting that the evolution of dangerous rescue involved sexual selection in the context of intergroup conflict. Men engaged in costly signaling by engaging in dangerous tasks; women recognized those displays of courage and preferred those men as mates. Solutions to the Problem of Rescue? Several different policy options exist to address the problem of timely rescue. The first section that follows sets out different evaluation criteria that are appropriate for assessing and comparing different policy options. The second section identifies and discusses different policy options. The third section compares the different policy options using the proposed evaluation criteria. The last section summarizes the findings of this policy analysis and makes a recommendation. Evaluation Criteria How should different policy options for rescue be evaluated? A comprehensive list might include as many as ten criteria. (1) Reporting of emergencies: A more effective policy option will be one that results in a higher percentage of emergencies being reported to authorities and a shorter time interval between the initial occurrence of emergencies and when they are reported. (2) Assistance to victims of accidents/crimes/hazards: A more effective policy option will be one in which a higher percentage of victims of accidents/crimes/hazards obtain assistance. (3) Reduction in numbers of accidents/crimes/hazards: A more effective policy option will be one that does a better job reducing the number of accidents/crimes/hazards. (4) Duties: A policy option will be preferable the fewer new duties or legal obligations that it imposes upon citizens. (5) Moral hazard (careless victim): A policy option will be preferable the less it encourages individuals to engage in risky behavior that leads to accidents/crimes/hazards because of the availability and certainty of rescue.


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(6) Torts: A policy option will be preferable if it is associated with fewer torts. (7) Costs: A more efficient policy option will be one that costs less money. Costs can be borne either by government, nonprofit organizations, or by businesses and individuals. (8) Moral posture: A policy option will be preferable if it is consistent with the average person’s values. Moral posture amounts to an argument in favor of or in opposition to a policy based solely on moral grounds without regard to what an average person is capable of doing. It can deflect from serious consideration of other evaluation criteria. (9) Careless rescue: A policy option will be preferable the less it encourages rescuers to engage in risky behavior that creates additional accidents/crimes/hazards. (10) Opportunism (cheating): A policy option will be preferable the less it encourages cheating by either rescuers or those they are trying to rescue. Rescuers may feign rescue, “victims” may feign either being injured or being in a hazard.

Policy Options There are a number of policy options for rescue that might be considered. One of these options is the policy status quo—no general duty to assist. This policy option assumes the place of the counterfactual against which other policy options may be compared. Below is a short synopsis of these options:7 No general duty to assist: This is the common law tradition that recognizes no legal obligation on the part of individuals to render any kind of assistance to anyone, regardless of circumstances, unless there is some kind of special relationship that is recognized by law. Extend special relationships: Under this policy option, laws would be changed to recognize special relationships and situations that the law currently does not recognize. Currently, the law recognizes a variety of special relationships where a duty to rescue exists, such as between a driver and a passenger, an inn keeper and a guest, a teacher and a pupil, and a police officer and a citizen (McCabe, 1984). As an example of the extension of such special relationships, adults might be legally required to report cases of suspected child abuse (Franklin and Ploeger, 2000) Limited duty to assist—notify authorities: Under this policy option, adults would be legally obligated to notify authorities of emergencies in situations

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where they were witnesses, where they have the means to do so, and where they were unaware that others had not already notified authorities. Extensive duty to assist: Under this policy option, adults would be legally obligated to give assistance in wide array of accident/crime/hazard situations where they have the means to do so. For example, if they were the first to witness an automobile accident involving potential injury, they would be legally obligated to stop at the scene and determine whether or not they could give help. If a first aid kit were available, and if they had knowledge, they would be expected to render first aid. At a minimum, they would be expected to notify authorities. This option is closest to the definition of Good Samaritan Law—“a law that requires a person to come to the aid of another who is exposed to grave physical harm if there is no danger or risk or injury to the rescuer” Black’s Law Dictionary Pocket Edition (Garner, 2001). Reward system: Under this policy option, a nonprofit organization would be established and funded to set up a system of awards for ordinary persons who engage in rescues. Disinterested parties, such as an advisory board of the nonprofit organization, using official reports of public authorities or the testimony of witnesses, could apply for an award on behalf of the “good Samaritan.” Awards could be both symbolic (a plaque, a medal) and monetary. A monetary award might be given to a charity in the name of the good Samaritan.

Evaluating Policy Options The analytic technique of multi-goal analysis is useful in comparing a limited number of policy options where multiple evaluation criteria exist (Weimer and Vining, 1999). Table 11.2 shows such an analysis. Evaluation criteria are the rows, and policy options are the columns. Entries in the table are ratings of each of the policy options on each of the criteria. Entries that are bold faced reflect the highest-ranking option on particular criteria; options that are italicized are the lowest ranking option. Examining table 11.2, the status quo—no general duty to assist is the best option with respect to the largest number of evaluation criteria. Nevertheless, if greater weighting is given to the first two criteria, on grounds that a new policy is needed to address the problem at hand—improving the reporting of emergencies, and improving assistance to victims, the reward system option would come out on top. Some discussion is warranted about the entries, most of which are based on judgment. With respect to the reporting of emergencies, the reward system is expected to rank highest. It is the only policy option that provides

Table 11.2 Comparing Policy Options for Rescue Policy option Status quo— no general duty to assist

Extend special relationships

Limited duty to assist— notify authorities

Extensive duty to assist—Good Samaritan Law

Reward system

No change

Small increase likely

Increase, perhaps temporary

No change due to lack of implementation

Increase

Assistance to victims of accidents/ crimes hazards

No change

Small increase likely

Increase, perhaps temporary

No change due to lack of implementation

Increase

Reduction in numbers of accidents/ crimes hazards

No change

Decrease due to extension of tort

No change

No change

No change

Duties

No new duty of citizenship

New duties for new classes

New but narrow duty of citizenship

New, extensive, but vague duties of citizenship

No new duty of citizenship

Moral hazard (careless victim) Torts

Low

Moderate

Moderate

Moderate

No change

Moderate increase

Small increase

Low due to lack of implementation No change due to lack of implementation

Evaluation criteria Reporting of emergencies

No change

(Continued)

Table 11.2 Continued Policy option Status quo— no general duty to assist

Extend special relationships

Limited duty to assist— notify authorities

Extensive duty to assist—Good Samaritan Law

Reward system

No change for public costs; low costs to private parties

Higher public costs due to increased civil litigation; higher private costs due to insurance and litigation

Unlikely to have increased litigation costs because of multiple tort feasors; low private costs

Unlikely to have increased litigation because of prosecutor discretion; low private costs

Public costs to verify rescues; private costs of rewards paid by non-profits, etc.

Moral posture and altruism

Low; altruism voluntary

Moderate; institutionalizes direct reciprocity

High; creates limited positive right

Very high; creates extensive positive rights

Moderate; institutionalizes indirect reciprocity

Careless rescue

Very low

Moderate

Low

Low due to lack of implementation

High

Opportunism (cheating)

Very low

High

Low

Low due to lack lack of implementation

Moderate

Evaluation criteria Costs


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a positive inducement to report emergencies. Extending special relationships should lead to a small increase in reporting with the increase being proportionate to the number of new special relationships that are created. The policy option of an extensive duty to assist is likely to result in little or no increase in reporting. With this option, there is no positive inducement to report, only a negative inducement. It is not consistent with what is known about the reaction range of human altruism. In the few states that have enacted Good Samaritan Laws, including Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Vermont, they have been almost entirely symbolic. Many citizens will not accept a law that compels them to come to the rescue of total strangers regardless of the risk. In those states, police have not and are probably not capable of enforcing the law.8 With respect to reducing the numbers of accidents/crimes/hazards, the policy option of extending special relationships ranks highest because of increased torts. New categories of special relationships mean that new categories of persons can be held legally responsible for conducting rescue. Anticipating such a legal responsibility, they will rationally either avoid establishing such a special relationship or take steps to reduce the uncertainties and risks associated with it. For example, if a business owner is held legally responsible for the rescue of customers in case of fire, he/she may hire an expert in fire safety, install sprinklers and additional fire extinguishers, add additional fire exits, and train employees in rescue methods. A disadvantage of several policy options is moral hazard. To the extent that citizens are assured of rescue, they may engage in risky behavior. For example, many homeowners fail to install and maintain smoke detectors, even though they are proven to be effective. People are often poor judges of risks. They grossly underestimate the dangers of riding a bicycle without a helmet and driving an automobile without a buckled seat belt. With respect to moral posture, Good Samaritan Law ranks highest (judged to be a bad feature). There is a substantial legal and philosophical literature that discusses the morality of Good Samaritan Law. Good Samaritan Law is rare in common law jurisdictions (e.g., Great Britain and its former colonies) where the legal view is that a failure to rescue constitutes an omission and for that reason is not a crime. Good Samaritan Law is very common in code law countries (e.g., the countries of continental Europe), however, where legal views tend to accommodate citizen duties. Pardun (1998) provides an excellent summary of the moral and practical arguments both for and against Good Samaritan Law. Some authors appear to favor Good Samaritan Law and see value to moral “posturing.” Kagan (1989) argues that morality more than occasionally

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makes extreme demands on us, requiring a stringent duty to help. Lipkin (1983) argues that the common law tradition is distinctive. He sees American society to be an outlier because of its extreme emphasis upon individualism—especially the value of personal liberty. In American society, a person generally may be held liable if their acts injure another but they may not be held liable for acts of omission. Armstrong (2000) argues that even though American society places a high value on individualism, its historical traditions also include ideas of civic republicanism and communitarianism, ideas that would support Good Samaritan Law. Waldron (2000) argues that rescue situations are not just about moral obligations. The proximity of an individual to a victim in time and space itself creates a special relationship and duties that the law should address. Other authors, however, appear to oppose Good Samaritan Law, arguing on liberal grounds that it is a type of compulsory altruism (see review by Pardun, 1998). Dressler (2000) finds arguments based upon principles of legality, retributive justice, utilitarian penal theory, and conceptions of the liberal state as good reasons to oppose Good Samaritan Law. Scheffler (1992) argues that even though morality sometimes requires significant sacrifices of us, the most demanding moral theories such as Kagan’s are wrong. Conclusion An understanding of biological theories of altruism helps us to better understand the reaction range of average persons to rescue situations. The warnings of some moral and legal philosophers that citizens have an extensive duty of beneficence, unfortunately or not, will not be acted upon. Although the solution to problems of rescue may not be Good Samaritan Law, it is possible to identify potentially more effective approaches. For example, the prevalence of indirect reciprocity as a means of encouraging altruism in human groups suggests that a reward system might work. The status quo policy of no general duty to assist has many advantages over the other options. That it is part of the common law and has seldom been tampered with suggests that it has passed the test of time, a basis of judgment that would be favored by political conservatives. The option of extending special relationship favors an incremental approach to the problem of rescue. It is the only option that has some prospect of reducing the number of accidents/crimes/hazards. It may be an especially valuable option for cases of child abuse where the victims themselves are often unable to report their own victimization. The option of a limited duty to assist—notify authorities is a low-cost option. It will become an increasingly more effective option as the


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use of cellular phones spreads throughout the population. It is difficult to see, however, how arrests could be made of those who witnessed emergencies but failed to use their cell phones to report them. Will all of the witnesses to an accident who did not inform authorities be arrested? As argued above, the option of an extensive duty to assist appears to require altruism that is beyond the reaction range of the average person. It is advisable, anyway, that dangerous rescue be left to professionals who possess both the motivation and training to conduct them successfully. The theory of sexual selection suggests that men on average will be better suited physically and psychologically for occupations that require dangerous rescue. Good Samaritan Laws are largely symbolic. They succeed in affirming the social norm that individuals, if they are able, should try to help out those who exposed to grave physical harm. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of many rescue situations, individuals often will not know whether or not they are required by law to intervene, and may not know when the general duty to assist ends. It is difficult in many cases for police to know who witnessed a perilous situation but nevertheless failed to assist. Finally, Good Samaritan Laws would be costly to enforce because of the opportunity costs of resources spent to investigate, arrest, and adjudicate violators. The reward system option has many attractive features. It does best on the first two evaluation criteria that decision-makers are likely to regard as being the most important. It regularly publicizes and thus reinforces the norm of social responsibility. It creates no new duty of citizenship. It is not very costly, and will be fairly easy to implement. Political jurisdictions might work with interested nonprofit organizations to implement a reward system on a trial basis to ascertain its overall effectiveness in increasing the reporting of emergencies and improving assistance to the victims of accidents/crimes/hazards. Acknowledgment The author thankfully acknowledges support for this project from the Richard J. Barber Fund for Interdisciplinary Research. Notes 1. Luke 10: 30–35. “A certain man . . . fell among thieves … which . . . wounded him . . . leaving him half dead . . . there came down a certain priest . . . when he say him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite . . . passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan . . . came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, and went to him . . . and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow when he

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departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him: and whatsoever thou spendest more . . . I will repay thee.” http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/ncsa/index.html. http://www.health.state.ny.us/hysdoh/research/injury. http://www.americanheart.org/Heart_and_stroke_. http://www.disastercenter/com/crime/uscrime.htm. http://www.cdc.gov/hcipc/daip/spotlite/natfire.htm. This paper does not consider the option of improved citizen training in first aid and rescue methods. Such training is very likely to enhance both interventions in and the reporting of accidents, crimes (Geis and Huston, 1983), and hazards. There is only a single case—in Wisconsin—of a person being charged with violating a Good Samaritan Law.

References Alexander, Richard D. (1979). Darwinism and Human Affairs. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Armstrong, Margalynne. (2000). Can Good Samaritan Laws fit into the United States legal/political framework? A brief response to Elspeth Farmer, Joshua Dressler, and Marc Franklin. Santa Clara Law Review 40: 1027–1032. Axelrod, Robert. (1984). The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books. Buss, David M. (1999). Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Cohen, Ronald. (1972). Altruism: Human, cultural, or what? Journal of Social Issues 28: 39–57. Darley, John M. and C. Daniel Batson. (1973). From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27: 100–108. Darwin, Charles. (1981). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dressler, Joshua. (2000). Some brief thoughts (mostly negative) about “bad Samaritan” laws. Santa Clara Law Review 40: 971–990. Franklin, Marc A. and Matthew Ploeger. (2000). Of rescue and report: Should tort law impose a duty to help endangered persons or abused children? Santa Clara Law Review 40: 991–1026. Garner, Bryan A. editor. (2001). Black’s Law Dictionary (Pocket), 2nd Edition. St. Paul, MW: West Information Publishing Group. Geis, Gilbert, and Ted L. Huston. (1983). Bystander intervention into crime: Public policy considerations. Policy Studies Journal 11: 398–408. Gergen, Kenneth J., Mary M. Gergen, and Kenneth Meter. (1972). Individual orientations to prosocial behavior. Journal of Social Issues 28: 105–130. Greenwald, Anthony G. (1975). Does the good Samaritan parable increase helping? A comment on Darley and Batson’s no-effect conclusion. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 32: 578–583.


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Hamilton, William D. (1996). The genetical evolution of social behaviour, I and II. In William D. Hamilton, (Ed.), Narrow Roads of Gene Land. The Collected Papers of W. D. Hamilton, pp. 11–84. New York: W. H. Freeman/Spektrum. Homans, George C. (1961). Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Huston, Ted L., Gilbert Geis, Richard Wright, and Thomas Garrett. (1976). Good Samaritans and crime victims. Victimology 1: 284–294. Kagan, Shelly. (1989). The Limits of Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latané, Bibb and John M. Darley. (1970). The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t He Help? New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Lipkin, Robert J. (1983). Beyond good Samaritans and moral monsters: An individualistic justification of the general legal duty to rescue. UCLA Law Review 31: 252–293. Lois, Jennifer. (1999). Socialization to heroism: Individualism and collectivism in a voluntary search and rescue group. Social Psychology Quarterly 62: 117–135. Masters, Roger D. (1989). The Nature of Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press. McCabe, Lisa. (1984). Police officers’ duty to rescue or aid: Are they only good Samaritans? California Law Review 72: 661–696. Paloutzian, Raymond F. (1979). Note on the attribution and reinforcement analyses of altruism. Journal of Psychology & Theology 7: 114–117. Pardun, J. T. (1998). Good Samaritan Laws: A global perspective. Loyola L. A. International and Comparative Law Journal 20: 591–609. Ridolfi, Kathleen M. (2000). Law, ethics, and the good Samaritan: Should there be a duty to rescue? Santa Clara Law Review 40: 957–970. Rosenhan, D. L. (1972). Learning theory and prosocial behavior. Journal of Social Issues 28: 151–163. Rushton, J. Phillipe. (1989). Genetic similarity, human altruism, and group selection (with commentaries and author’s response). Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12: 503–559. Scheffler, Samuel (1992). Human Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sober, Elliott and David S. Wilson. (1998). Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Staub, Ervin. (1972). Instigation to goodness: The role of social norms and interpersonal influence. Journal of Social Issues 28: 131–150. Trivers, Robert L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology 46: 35–57. Waldron, Jeremy. (2000). On the road: good Samaritans and compelling duties. Santa Clara Law Review 40: 1053–1103. Walster, Elaine and Jane A. Piliavin. (1972). Equity and the innocent bystander. Journal of Social Issues 28: 165–188. Weimer, David L. and Aidan R. Vining. (1999). Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.


PART 3

Implications for International Policy


CHAPTER 12

An Ecological Approach to Agricultural Biotechnology Policy Hiram Caton

I think the regulation of recombinant DNA is perhaps the ideal case study in science and public policy . . . it offers an unparalleled sweep of new opportunity. Those who are practicing the technology, let alone the investors, see exciting prospects of new medications, new agricultural crops, new means of remediating environmental problems. It is, in short, the source of stupendous possibilities. (Donald Kennedy, President of Stanford University, 1992)

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hirty years ago there was no biotechnology. The first biotech firm, Genentech, was established in 1976 by a venture capitalist and the scientist who devised the tool for splicing genes—recombinant DNA. The growth of Genentech from a modest start-up to an enterprise of 4,500 employees, $1.7 billion annual revenue and $26 billion market capitalization, is also the story of the growth of a new industry. As of 2000, there were 1,379 biotech firms in the United States, with a market capitalization of $353 billion, generating annual revenue of $25 billion. Some 130 drug products and vaccines are currently in use, while another 350 are in clinical trials.1 Biotechnology and its substrate, molecular biology, are ubiquitous. Every industry that uses biologics has been penetrated, but the two great arms of biotechnology are agriculture and medicine/pharmaceuticals. There is much in between: diagnostics, tests and assays, bioinformatics, the

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biochip, environmental remediation, and, just coming on stream, biomaterials. Worldwide, there are about 2,000 biotech firms, employing perhaps 210,000 staff. While biotechnology does not compare financially with the digital industry, its potential social and economic impact is far greater. Symbolic of that impact was the announcement of the completion of the first draft of the “book of life”—the sequencing of the human genome. The announcement, launched from the White House, provoked a blizzard of media features and high profile scientific publication that styled it the greatest achievement of twentieth-century science. President Clinton declared that the insights of the sequenced human genome would empower a new style of medical care, based on matching the patient’s genome to treatment regime, and greatly increased longevity.2 Biotechnology policy is mature in its principles and in the institutional machinery for framing and implementing policy (Nelson, 2001; Patterson, 2000; Murray and Mehlmann, 1999; Thompson, 1997; Krimsky and Wrubel, 1996; Wright, 1994; Krimsky, 1991). This is due in part to the circumstance that questions of safety, accountability, risk management, patents, university–industry relations, privacy, informed consent, environmental hazard, and so on, raised by biotechnology and its applications, mesh with the methods and agencies devised to oversee the uses of atomic energy, hazardous chemicals and wastes, food and drug safety, environmental protection, and medical experimentation. Biotechnology added new stimuli to the growth of these structures but also drives an ongoing search for new structures and regulatory principles adequate to the scope of the field.3 Similarly, the alignment of interests in Congress and regulatory agencies is like the alignments that are well described for agricultural, environmental, and health politics although here again new interests have arisen around animal welfare, biomedicine, privacy, and the like (Wagner, 1999: 227–234; Browne, 1998: 42–63, 141–145; Miller, 1997). Biotech policy analysts spread through institutionally diverse locations and apply themselves to very different tasks. Most practitioners have learned on the job or indeed have created a niche in response to their organization’s acquisition of a biotech involvement. Investment, consulting, public relations and legal firms, industry associations, consumer associations, special interest groups, the media, corporations, universities, think tanks, religious denominations, and governments have created house expertise to cater for biotechnology. Academics specializing in the area tend to be self-taught and share no common disciplinary background. Degree programs in biotechnology policy are a recent development. They tend to be located in postgraduate management schools and hybridize management skills with knowledge of biotech infrastructure and to some extent the science.4

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Evolutionary Frameworks for Biotechnology Policy My task is to place biotechnology policy in an evolutionary framework. In a nontrivial sense, this is a fait accompli, at least in agricultural applications. Crop modification, pest control, land, forest, and water management—in short, environmental management—are interventions involving ecological methodologies focused to greater or lesser depth on evolutionary parameters (Willmer et al., 2000). That an evolutionary approach is implicit in medical investigations and applications is not at first apparent. A closer look reveals that what Randolph Nesse and George C. Williams have styled “Darwinian medicine” cuts a broad path across the field (Nesse and Williams, 1996). Thanks to the large number of conserved genes, the human genome incorporates elements reaching into deep evolutionary time. It includes about 230 genes acquired from bacteria, there are about 700 genes in common with the fruit fly Drosophila, and the molecular chemistry of the body’s many systems are but marginally distinct from other mammals when not identical, as they often are. Another perspective is provided by behavior genetics, which is used to estimate the heritability of traits and disease conditions. The field will grow in importance as molecular medicine homes in on the causes and therapeutics of heritable diseases (McGuffin et al., 2001: 1248–1249). Intertwined with this endeavor is the mapping of human genetic diversity, which provides clues to heritable diseases and also illuminates the history and dispersal of populations over millennia. An Iceland biotech firm, Decode Genetics, has mapped that country’s population; Estonia, Israel, and the United Kingdom are in the course of following suit. In these and other ways, medically focused biotechnology casts light on human evolution and conversely. Given the evolutionary perspectives inherent in biotechnology and given the maturity of policy, it should be a straightforward task to characterize existing evolutionary approaches and elaborate as may be needed. This, unfortunately, is not the case, and for two main reasons. The first is the diversity of policy topics and areas. The editors of the Encyclopedia of Ethical, Legal and Policy Issues in Biotechnology divide the field into 112 subjects, all supported by a substantial literature (Murray and Mehlmann, 1999). Rescuing a thread of continuity amidst this diversity is no small challenge. Apart from helpful but nonspecific background information, it is difficult to imagine a core evolutionary “curriculum” that would be directly relevant to, say, intellectual property law and tissue engineering research. Indeed, the splintering is so extensive that one doesn’t easily imagine even a core management “curriculum”: the ambience of, say, a land use manager is very different from those devising means to transfer biotech

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industry to developing nations. The few existing management curricula tend to narrow their focus to specific areas of biotechnology. The second challenge is that, despite the efflorescence of human evolutionary science in recent decades, the piece important to policy evaluation, a theory of cultural evolution capable of dealing with real-world microprocesses as well as the big picture, is still in the making. The core of recent labors, called variously “sociobiology,” “evolutionary psychology,” and “behavioral ecology,” is largely concerned with assembling a picture of human nature embedded in life histories, but not in longitudinal institutional settings (“history”) or in a theory of social change (Alcock, 2001: 7–22; Badcock, 2000: xi–xiii; Irons and Cronk, 2000: 12–26).5 Effort has concentrated on mate choice and reproductive strategies, social competition, and the like, but these researches are so many reminders of the continuing presence of our evolutionary behavioral past (the hunter-gatherer) in the complex habitat of that which weaves many millions into a dynamic social web linked by myriad instantaneous worldwide communications.6 This built habitat is the locus of biopolitics (Caldwell, 1990: 191–198). It greatly influences the expression of our evolved behaviors. For example, the ancient sexual division of labor that still prevailed in the developed world only a century ago has been diluted by social change that gives women control of their reproduction and dramatically changes perception of sexual roles (Tiger, 2000: 61–90). Darwinians postulate reproductive fitness as the ultimate cause of human behavior, as it is the ultimate cause of the behavior of all organisms. Clearly the reproductive impulse continues to exercise powerful influence, from controversy over stem cell research to sex role conflicts to the effects of differential reproduction between competing populations, to voluntary childlessness. Still, an enumeration of the loci of Darwinian tentacles into contemporary human habitats provides insufficient contextualization for biotechnology policy.7 To make our mark, we require a Darwinian contextualization superior to the Standard Social Scientific Model (SSSM) while nevertheless overlapping with it. That contextualization, I propose, is the ecological perspective on modern social systems. Ecology is the study of species interactions (or biological communities) in relation to habitats and niches. Ecology as a policy dimension rests on the proposition that societal action interacts with nature or the environment in ways that affect the outcomes of intended action and/or ways that affect the sustainability of a particular aspect of the natural world upon which civilization depends. While this insight is not seriously in contention today, and indeed enjoys a commanding policy consensus, it was not always so. Token public awareness of it may be dated to the onset of conservationism around


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1900 (McCormick, 1989: 1–14). E. P. Odum’s The Fundamentals of Ecology (1953), which brought together plant, animal, and human communities, is usually credited as being the first systematic overview. The significance of these interactions was dramatized for the general public by marine biologist Rachel Carson’s eloquent Silent Spring (1962), which attributed extensive environmental damage and health impairments to pesticides, especially DDT. Here for the first time the public was familiarized with the basic ecological idea of interaction. Carson’s alarm was followed in the next two decades by a deluge of studies of culture–nature interactions, for example, population growth, industrial carcinogens, air and water pollution, radiation contamination, resource depletion, potential species-threatening epidemics, global warming, and the collapse of biodiversity (Efron, 1985: 21–66; Caldwell, 1990: 85–100). Doomsday forecasts, usually calibrated to the near future, became and remain commonplace. The industrial system supporting modern civilization was said to be rapidly destroying the natural capital that it presupposed, and hence was “unsustainable.” It was said the Enlightenment idea of man as master of nature must be replaced by the idea of a symbiotic relation with nature. The new awareness is well expressed by J. R. McNeill in his history of environmentalism, Something New under the Sun: “The human race, without intending anything of the sort, has undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment on the earth. In time, I think, this will appear as the most important aspect of twentieth-century history, more so than World War II, the communist enterprise, the rise of mass literacy, the spread of democracy, or the growing emancipation of women” (McNeill, 2000: 358). Such is the attractive force of this awareness that even disciplines resolutely committed to the SSSM have been unable to resist its influence (Dunlap et al., 2002). The ecological perspective achieves four things needful for a Darwinian approach to biotechnology policy. The most important, from a systematic point of view, is that it links directly to the experimental evidence and applications of agricultural biotechnology. To modify crops and animals is to introduce something akin to new species and thus to modify ecosystems. Such activity cannot be evaluated without the ecological perspective, which is, as I have indicted, established if not ubiquitous on the policy landscape. Secondly, ecology helps close the disabling gap between basic NeoDarwinian theory and the here and now. For example, Neo-Darwinism prefers a gradualist theory of change, but this conceptual apparatus does not deal with nonequilibrium conditions that unleash nonlinear cascade or avalanche effects when carrying capacity or assimilative capacity are overshot; or when climatic change revamps ecosystems on a large scale (Homer-Dixon,

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2001: 37–41). Again, Neo-Darwinians tend to restrict their change mechanism to natural selection, but for agricultural biotechnology, horizontal gene transfer within and between species, as it occurs in nature and in modified organisms, is of cardinal importance.8 Thirdly, ecology provides a tool for expanding evidence-based theory of social change. For nearly two centuries the core of that theory has been economics, especially the economics of growth (the theory of progress). But until recently, economists regarded nature as an exogenous variable that they need not consider. This remains true of mainstream, but the efforts of Kenneth Boulding and others have yielded fruit in the robust subfield of ecological economics (Wilkinson, 1973; Boulding, 1978; Diesendorf and Hamilton, 1996; Perrings, 1997). Ecology tracks the pathways of societalecosystem interactions that must be assessed if we are to have foresight of the alternative developmental scenarios that lie ahead. Finally, ecology assists the Darwinian policy analyst to position a value matrix. There is little choice in the matter because the policy landscape is already densely occupied by value matrices purporting to derive from ecologically based assessments of societal developments. Heterogeneous, indeed inconsistent policy outcomes have been derived from these matrices, ranging from the doomsday forecasts of global meltdown to reaffirmation of confidence in continued economic growth and increasing human welfare (Milbrath, 1989; Caldwell, 1990; Simon, 1995; Tokar, 1997; MacNeill et al., 1991; Bailey, 2000). But the common thread is consensus that the ecological evidence is critically important to public choice. Biotechnology occupies a critical place in any ecological framework. It does so in the first instance because it is a new phase in the baseline technology that enabled and still enables civilization, agriculture. Plant and animal cultivation are at the heart of the earth’s ecological dynamics. Agriculture also figures importantly in all aspects of human health, infectious diseases, and population control. The Standard Position There is no single authoritative statement of the ecological framework. The closest approach is perhaps a series of United Nations declarations, protocols, and agreements stretching over three decades, inter alia, the UN Conference on the Human Environment (1972), the World Conservation Strategy (1980), the World Charter of Nature (the UN’s basic environmental ethics document, 1982), World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) Report, Our Common Future (1987); the Global


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Biodiversity Strategy (1991), the Rio Declaration on the Environment (1992), the Biodiversity Convention (1992), the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol (2000), and the Kyoto Protocol (1998) to combat global warming.9 The ecological assessment contained in these documents corresponds roughly to alarms mentioned previously. Specifically: ●

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Agriculture imposes heavy environmental burdens through agrochemical run-off into rivers and oceans, through soil salinization, by raising water tables that waterlog land, by habitat destruction involved in taking hitherto unused land under cultivation. Greenhouse emissions from industrial production and transport contribute to global warming and to the many diverse effects that warming is expected to have. The concentration of populations draws numerous disease-carrying pests and parasites into human communities. The movement of people and goods tends to spread pests and diseases universally. This includes the movement of opportunistic invasive species that achieve overdominance and destroy endemic habitats. Population during the past 150 years has increased at a Malthusian rate, generating even greater pressure on land, water resources, and forests. The growth rate is unsustainable and will have catastrophic consequences unless it is arrested.

In the human development dimension of these documents, a wide gap is discerned between peoples of the developed and the developing world. Human rights, especially for women and children, education, minimal nutrition and hygiene, clean water and air, good government, and the promise of a better future are not available to as many as a third of the world’s 6 billion people. The documents promote reducing the gap between the rich and the poor, promotion of human solidarity and equality while preserving cultural diversity, and the promotion of peace and justice. These values and assessments may be refined into a dilemma. “Sustainable development” means that economic growth as it unfolded hitherto must be ratcheted down by reducing consumption, by switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, downsizing industrial farming, and so on according to the Kyoto Protocols’ “limits to growth” formula, which is meant to preserve the natural capital needed to sustain life.10 At the same time, the affluence enjoyed by 30 percent of the world’s population is to be spread to the remainder, even as world population continues to increase from the present 6 billion to 9.5 billion in 2070, when growth is expected to level off.

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In other words, by 2070, about 7.2 billion people are to be brought to the level of well-being enjoyed by the advantaged 30 percent today, even as economic growth is down-shifted to compensate for global warming and other growth-induced deficits. How is this possible? UN documents address the difficulty by distinguishing between “development” and the standard economic measure of societal distributed benefit, GDP: social and material wellbeing may be greatly improved without acquiring consumer habits that drive the present environmental impasse. This may be so (the popularity of Western lifestyles in even the poorest regions makes one doubt); still it is not a satisfactory response since enormous economic growth must occur if expanding populations are to be only minimally housed and fed.11 Is there another way to conceptualize these challenges? “Cornucopia”: The Alternative Position What I call the Standard Position has become so much the orthodoxy that the existence of an alternative is generally known only as ad hoc criticisms (often called “brown lash”) of the excesses of environmental doom forecasts or of draconian legislation that damages business and employment. The antagonism is found in the domestic politics of most developed nations. But over the past decade, there has emerged something like a united front presenting an across-the-board analysis challenging the standard position on all key ecological variables. Environmentalists label it “cornucopia,” meaning, the belief that the brief run of exponential economic growth can be extended indefinitely. Cornucopians do not deny that human interaction with the environment is mission critical. Instead they maintain that the doom scenarios are greatly exaggerated and sometimes fictive; that the free market’s many self-corrective mechanisms, combined with free government, have provided most of the corrections needed to date; that the state of humanity has been steadily improving and is likely to continue on that course (Simon, 1995; Easterbrook, 1996; Bailey, 2000; Lomborg, 2001). Agbiotech occupies a critical if not decisive position in relation to this dilemma. Its proponents (which include most governments and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization) believe that it is the means to meet the world’s coming food needs, just as today’s billions are the beneficiaries of the hybridization revolution (the Green Revolution) of the 1960s. Yet it is deeply controversial. Doubt about the safety of GM food has taken root among consumers, especially in Europe. Literally thousands of environmental groups are intransigently opposed to agbiotech, which they view as a technology that, like nuclear energy, must be refused. As a result of this agitation, governments


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that have accepted the “cornucopian” argument for agbiotech, and indeed have invested heavily in it, become equivocal in their commitment, principally by instituting regulations and oversight regimes that have the effect of thwarting trade in GM food products. To place the issue in context, let us briefly review the cornucopian case that economic growth, driven by innovation and consumer demand, has produced benevolent results. The base line for economic comparison is the Green Revolution of the 1960s, which introduced high-yield hybrid cereals. The revolution was not exclusively in plant breeding. It was accompanied by improved cropping techniques, increased use of pesticides and herbicides, soil improvement and conservation methods, and abandonment of low productivity and soil damaging practices. In 1950, with a world population of 2.5 billion, the aggregate cereal production was 692 million tons of grain. By 1992, with a population of 5.7 million, the aggregate cereal production was 1,952 tons (Avery, 1995: 52). Productivity had increased from 1.1 to 2.8 tons per hectare (averaged for cereals). Commodity prices for all food have fallen 57 percent since 1980, while the global average daily caloric intake increased 18 percent from 1963–1992 (53). Poultry and livestock also benefited from improved hybrids and stock management techniques. The amount of feed required to produce poultry has been halved, while milk productivity per animal of quality American herds has tripled (60). Another way to look at the gains is to consider the outcomes when these practices are not implemented. A recent study of organic farming in Europe found that without pesticides, crop yields were 30–40 percent less than conventional farming (70). Nitrogen fertilizer is far more efficient in supplying plant nutrients than the organic farming method of using livestock manure and crop rotation. Less intensive cropping means that more land is required per unit of output. However, under the combined enhancements of the Green Revolution, the 1950 world productivity in grains was exceeded threefold by only a 13 percent increase in land use. Agbiotech is continuous with Green Revolution hybridization in that it is a technique for recombining genes to obtain desired outcomes. The departure lies in the fact that it is not restricted to recombination of genes between inter-fertile species. Consequently, no meaningful limit can be set to potential advantages. Thus, not only do the productivity increases of the Green Revolution get a fresh start, but many otherwise unobtainable (and perhaps unimaginable) beneficial results will accrue. The first generation of GM crops were engineered for pest and herbicide resistance. An inserted gene from the Bacillus thuringiensis bacterium confers pest resistance on corn and cotton (called Bt corn and cotton). Bt crops eliminate the need to weed crops

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by plowing, which in turn enhances growth (by leaving roots undisturbed) while at the same time allowing for the compaction of crops. Leaf rust, which is often a severe blight on wheat, has been eliminated by inserting a rust resistant gene from a wild relative of wheat (Avery, 1995: 67). In rice, the tungro virus has been stopped by inserting a virus resistant gene. Hawaii’s papaya industry, devastated by the ringspot virus, was rehabilitated by a transgenic papaya tree resistant to the virus. Pigs with half the normal body fat, reared on one-quarter of the normal feed requirements, are produced by a genetically engineered copy of a natural pig growth hormone. Forestry has also benefited from a combination of rapid growth, high yield, and disease resistance traits. In the pipeline are foods with their allergenic genes deleted (wheat, milk, and nuts), foods delivering nutrients not present in the conventional product (“nutriceuticals”), and the use of crops to deliver vaccines (thus eliminating the risks associated with injections, especially in developing countries). Developing countries also stand to benefit from crops with enhanced protein content, salt, and drought-tolerant crops, and the remarkable apomixis technology, which converts sexual hybrids to asexual reproduction. Asexual reproduction means that farmers have no need to purchase new seed for each harvest (to avoid yield reduction), but may plant their own seed indefinitely. The first GM food to come to market was Calgene’s FlavrSavr tomato, introduced in 1994. Food retailers promoted it as a premium product. The response was gratifying; soon other GM fresh vegetables were introduced, again as improved products, attracting a premium price. The encouraging consumer response helped spark large-scale planting of GM crops. In 1996, 1.7 million hectares were planted, mostly in the United States. Five years later, the global total was 52.6 million hectares (130 million acres) harvested by 5.5 million farmers in forty countries. The main crops were soybeans, corn, cotton, and canola, modified for herbicide tolerance. The main producers were the United States, with 68 percent of the total, followed by Argentina, Canada, and China.12 India recently lifted its ban on GM cultivars under pressure from cotton growers, who expect to double their yields using Bt cotton. As I write, Brazil, the largest agricultural producer in Latin America, is poised to lift its ban on GM cultivars. China, which has been cautious relative to the size of its agricultural produce, is now expected to expand substantially the use of GM cultivars. The EU and its member nations have invested heavily in agbiotech R&D. Over 65 cultivars, including sacrosanct wine grapes, are presently being field tested in 14 countries. This is an astonishing product innovation, reminiscent of the all-conquering Green Revolution of the 1960s.


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Resistance to agbiotech is visible in the first instance as consumer misgivings about the safety of GM foods. In Europe, food retailers with a turnover exceeding $300 billion a year have pledged consumers not to stock GM foods (Kane, 2001: 235 f.). In Europe and North America, anti-GM direct action campaigns have persuaded numerous food retailers and produces to foreswear GM products and ingredients; among them are Starbucks, Campbell’s, Trader Joe’s, McDonald’s, Kraft, Kellogg’s, Taco Bell, Coca-Cola, Burger King, Nestle, and Gerber. Consumer mistrust is also widespread in Japan despite the absence of grass roots campaigns against GM foods. Here again a government, despite its endorsement of biotechnology and funding of biotech R&D, has placed strict controls on the importation of GM foods or foods with GM ingredients. Another factor in the campaign has been the activities of “eco-vandals” who destroy GM crops or crop trails. These groups are closely associated by the media with animal liberationists who raid laboratories experimenting with transgenic animals as well as on intensive animal farming installations. The cumulative damage estimate of such actions in the United States alone is $65 million.13 The animus against GM food is generated substantially by the organic food industry, with the support and encouragement of many environmental groups.14 Organic farming is indeed an early environmentalist response to the methods of industrial agriculture. By eschewing all agrichemicals in production processes and all additives in processed foods, organic producers project a product image of wholesome, natural food. The market value of this image increases as consumers become more sensitive to possible compromises to food safety or more skeptical of government warranty of food safety or more alarmed by diet-related “epidemics,” such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. A confounding factor in the reception of GM foods, certainly in Europe, was the outbreak of mad cow disease (BSE or bovine spongiform encephalopathy) in British herds and its human version, new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD). Although this blight had nothing to do with genetic engineering, it was a classic food scare that closely paralleled the organic industry’s case against GM food safety. The parallel factors were that the effects (always fatal) of nvCJD could be latent for decades, that no diagnostic was available to determine who might be infected with the virus, and—probably most important for collateral damage to confidence in GM food safety—two British governments badly mishandled the epidemic, giving the public strong but unwarranted safety assurances. The circumstance that the drama played out over a period of two years, spread alarm to Britain’s European trading partners, and imposed grave financial loss, lent credibility to the organic industry line that GM

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foods were a health disaster waiting to happen, despite official food safety assurances. The campaign to require labeling of processed foods containing GM ingredients is the organic industry’s most effective assault on its high-tech competitor. Nearly all developed nations except the United States and Canada now require labeling of processed foods that contain more than 1 percent of GM ingredients. This seemingly innocuous and justified concession to consumer preferences is in fact a major setback to the growth of GM food markets. It enables consumers who have doubts about GM products to avoid them. It also imposes the heavy burden on bulk handlers and suppliers to observe strict segregation between GM and conventional harvests, so that food manufacturers can be sure of the identity of the commodity throughout the manufacturing process. The burden is so heavy that many manufacturers and retailers have, as noted, opted to exclude GM ingredients or foods from their product line. This in turn sends a message to farmers who must be wary of fluctuating commodity markets. It is not clear at this writing that the GM food industry has devised a strategy to win public confidence in its products. The overt market approach, price competition, is bogged down. Product innovation may be a more promising avenue. Thus, removal of the allergenic components from products containing wheat and milk would make a wide range of foods available to those who at present must avoid them. New varieties of fresh fruits and vegetables, novel in appearance and color and fortified with nutrients absent from conventional or organic products, may be another avenue. Product innovation outside the food industry, in ornamental plants and grasses, is still another pathway. But perhaps the most promising of all rehabilitation pathways is medical applications of biotechnology. Consumer surveys reveal that such applications enjoy high consumer approval, with the exception of research involving destruction of human embryos or alterations of the human germ line. The inconsistency between doubting the safety of agbiotech on the farm while accepting it in the pharmacy must work to the advantage of the farm. The United States has expressed increasing impatience over what it sees as EU foot-dragging about trade in GM produce and products. In 1998 the EU imposed a moratorium on the importation of such products, pending the completion of its regulations of food labeling and source tracing. It also blocked the importation of U.S. beef fed a growth hormone (rBGH), on the ground that the hormone had been shown by a single study to be carcinogenic. The United States dismissed the study as a recycle of a previously discredited study and accused the EU of attempting to evade trade agreements. The United States sued the EU in the World Trade Organization and won.


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In regard to GM products, the United States chides the EU for, on the one hand, agreeing that there are no food safety issues that cannot be dealt with by agreed standards, and, on the other hand, constructing a regulatory apparatus so ponderous in the making and so obstructionist in practice as effectively to shut out trade in GM products. The United States holds the EU ban on GM products to be illegal under World Trade Organization rules. EU ambivalence raises the question whether it is in effect opting out of agbiotech and abandoning the investments of its member states and corporations.15 Summary and Conclusion The argument of this chapter has been that the ecological framework of societal action provides an apposite context for an evolutionary perspective on human behavior. Ancient writers understood that the invention of agriculture and cities was an axial event in human history. Today that insight has been extensively elaborated. We know that the rise and fall of empires was often closely associated with ecological overshoot, and that the rise of civilization was possible thanks only to the gratuitous global warming that some 13,000 years ago thawed the ice sheets extending over most of Eurasia and North America. Even within that favorable window of opportunity, minor climate oscillations and natural disasters have visited ruin or hardship on many peoples. We know that the past century and a half of growth is utterly unlike previous human history or the performance of any other species, for we have achieved ecological dominance over all life except microbes. Agricultural biotechnology represents a second, more far-reaching axial event, since it bestows the power to manipulate species indefinitely. For this reason it has become the test case for the choice between environmentalist and cornucopian interpretations of the ecological predicament. Cornucopians affirm the technology as an expression of the rationality that meliorates the human condition. For environmentalists the technology’s application represents perverse blindness to ethical and material need to reorient our cultural machinery from growth to a relation of stewardship toward nature, living within the limits of Earth’s biosphere. The choice between these alternatives depends on whether development, with ecological monitoring and correction mechanisms built in, is sustainable. If the answer is Yes, then the choice between living well and a return to the simple life vanishes, for no public is likely to deliberately forego benefits within reach. If the answer is No, and agriculture must of ecological necessity remain in the state of technologically arrested development (Caldwell, 1990: 188), then we should prepare for the brutal times that some believe are in the offing on

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the limits to growth scenario (Homer-Dixon, 2001). The fundamental political problem, as assessed by Lynton Caldwell, is that public values, sentiments, and preferences have not, despite the clear warnings of scientists, condensed into a settled political will for a sustainable society. He is not optimistic that the transformation will occur in time, for he writes: “Should a new ecologically-based social order emerge as a consequence of a world disaster of catastrophic proportions, the authority of knowledge might require implementation through iron government until such time as sustainable conditions were restored” (Caldwell, 1990: 198). One may doubt, on the basis of what usually happens in times of stress, that the war lords at the helm would be attentive to “the authority of knowledge” enjoining unrestricted altruism toward nature (“biophilia”). Instead nature, as expressed in human reproduction, would probably emerge as the issue of paramount importance (Smith et al., 1998). Draconian culling of surplus population might well become a policy option, or imperative, of the war lords. A Darwinian would not expect the resulting aggregations to be random, but would expect them to follow the established ethnic lines that index much of today’s international tensions. Such a grim future is all the more reason to hope that the cornucopian forecast will prevail over environmentalist doomsday. Notes 1. These figures have been compiled from a variety of industry reporting services, notably the Directory of Biotechnology Companies, 2001, published by the industry journal, Genetic Engineering News, and from the Biotechnology Industry Organization. See their websites, www.genergnews.com and www.bio.org.er/ statistics.asp. 2. The Human Genome Project website (www.ornl.gov/hgmis/publicat/ primer2001/1.html) summarizes the findings in a statement “What We’ve Learned So Far.” It provides an online Primer on Molecular Genetics (www.ornl. gov/hgmis/publicat/primer/toc.html) as well as access to project findings published in Nature February 15, 2001, and Science February 16, 2001. In his remarks, President Clinton sanctified the genome by styling it “the language in which God created life,” and continued: “We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift to heal” (White House Press Release, June 27, 2000). Clinton may be reflecting the views of Dr. Francis Collins, a devout Christian who headed the government genome project. 3. U.S. agricultural biotechnology regulation is shared between the FDA, EPA, and USDA, under an agreement called the “US Coordinated Framework for Regulation of Biotechnology” (www.aphis.usda.gov/ppq/biotech/usregs.html).


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The lead agency is the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of USDA. APHIS regulates field testing, movement of GM goods, and issues permits and establishes notification procedures. Biotechnology applied to humans falls under the administration of the FDA (for pharmaceuticals and medical appliances) or the NIH, which sets guidelines and administers the system of approval for medical experimentation. There is no federal legislation specific to biotechnology; the proposed legislation on human cloning and stem cell research would be the first. For a history of regulatory development, see Krimsky, 1991: 95–151; on the changing regulatory administration, see Malinowski, 1999: 220–221 and Wagner, 1999: 232. The College of Commerce, University of Saskatachewan, which has a significant commitment to agricultural biotechnology, offers a 24-credit major in Biotechnology Management. The curriculum may be viewed at www. commerce.usask.ca/ginfo/biotech.htm. The University of Maryland offers an M.Sc. in Biotechnology Studies, which covers regulation, finance, and management issues. Columbia University offers an M.A. in biotechnology preparing students for employment in regulatory agencies, industry, investment, and law. Texas A&M offers a master’s in biotechnology (M.Biot.). Northwestern University’s School of Management offers an M.B.A. in biotechnology. The curricula of these programs is not online. The antagonism to sociobiology (Segerstråle, 2000: 13–34, 177–189) is due in part to the absence of a theory of social change explaining how the inherited “Stone Age mind” has shifted its emotional and behavioral repertoire to become a compassionate, post-xenophobic, post-sexist, post-acquisitive humanist. Without such a vision, the evolutionary human paradigm, say the critics Segerstråle reviews, destroys hope for a better future. On this showing, society should censor global climatic change and other doom scenarios, lest they depress hope. In his Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), the independent scholar Howard Bloom surveys collective learning and intelligence across many species. His indepth thesis is that the core of sociality, at whatever level of biologic organization, is a process of information collection, sharing, and evaluation. Conversely, intelligence is preeminently group intelligence. His starting points are the extraordinary discoveries about bacterial sociality over the past decade or so, and the global brain concept, which was launched by informatics scientists who are persuaded that digital communication, especially the world wide web, is the vehicle for the emergence of collective global intelligence, i.e., a global brain. Although the thesis is far-fetched, Bloom highlights a wealth of recent biological findings on sociality. Political scientists affiliated in the Politics and Life Sciences Association have long been attentive to the potential contribution of sociobiology to their field. A basic assessment was undertaken in Elliott White’s 1981 edited volume, Sociobiology and Human Politics. Most contributors were sympathetic but critical. In rereading

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the criticisms in the light of two decades of research and debate, I found them to be prescient, particularly the contributions of Roger Masters, Glendon Schubert, and William Etkin. For partial assimilations of sociobiology by political scientists, see Masters, 1989; Somit and Peterson, 1997. 8. Proponents of “Universal Darwinism” (Richard Dawkins, Henry Plotkin) would contest this formulation, since in their view natural selection operates on every gene irrespective of the mode of transfer or transmission. But universal Darwinism incorporates Darwin’s inability to deal with the statis/change patterns of evolution as observed in vivo and in the fossil record. In population genetics this difference is expressed as stabilizing selection and directional selection. The situation in vivo is that most populations are in equilibrium, which is to say that directional selection toward speciation is not happening. This fact is obfuscated by the definition, in population genetics, of evolution as any change in allele frequency in a population. On this definition, a population in equilibrium is nevertheless “evolving.” Finally, universal Darwinism does not explain the spectacular anti-selectionist attributes of the eukaryote genome. Only a small fraction of genes are functional; the rest are free rider “junk.” In the human genome, the Alu sequence is repeated 580,000 times and comprises 12 percent of the genome. Moreover, such sequences may occur in the midst of a functional gene and must be cut out by enzymes before the gene can express—a bizarre maladaptation from a Darwinian point of view. This without mentioning the C value paradox (noncorrelation between genome informational content and organismic complexity), the presence of thousands of viral sequences in mammalian genomes, the decisive importance of protein folding to physiological function (highlighted by prions), gene networks that coordinate many genes to effect an outcome, and alternative protein expression (a single gene may code for many proteins). Neither the Central Dogma nor Darwinian theory explains these bizarre genome characteristics. 9. Most of these documents are published by the World Resources Institute, in collaboration with the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources and the UN Environment Program. See the WRI website for publication details (www.wri.org). For studies of the value implications of these policy directions, see Lester Milbrath’s Envisioning a Sustainable Society (1989), Lynton Caldwell, Between Two Worlds: Science, the Environmental Movement, and Policy Choice (1990), Jim MacNeill, Pieter Winsemius, and Taizo Yakushiji, Beyond Interdependence: The Meshing of the World’s Economy and the Earth’s Ecology (1991). 10. The UN primary document on sustainable development, the 800-page Agenda 21, attributes “deterioration of the global environment [to] the unsustainable pattern of consumption and production, particularly in industrialized countries, which is a matter of grave concern, aggravating poverty and imbalances . . . Although consumption patterns are very high in certain parts of the world, the basic consumer needs of a large section of humanity are not being met.


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This results in excessive demands and unsustainable lifestyles among the richer segments, which place immense stress on the environment” (www.un.org/esa/ sustdev/agenda21text.htm). The putative solution is to target efficiency improvements that reduce the energy and materials inputs per unit of output. This phenomenon is among the key features of technologically driven capitalism. But if the diagnosis is approximately correct, efficiency gains can but postpone ecological implosion, even in the absence of population growth. President Bush, in opting out of the Kyoto Protocol, stated that down-shifting economic growth and disposable income for Americans is not an option. These data are compiled by the International Service for Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (www.isaaa.org). The full report is Clive James, Global Review of Commercialized Transgenic Crops: 2000, ISAAA Briefs No. 23-2001, available at the ISAAA website. The war on agbiotech is tracked by the industry-supported Center for Food and Agriculture (www.cffar.org/vandalwatch). The Organic Consumers Association, which applauds the war, reports on it as well as many other agbiotech issues (www.organicconsumers.org). The International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, which claims 750 member organizations, declares that organic farming and genetic engineering are “two contradictory world views, two different philosophies, [that are] the main options for the future” (www.ifoam.org). The Organic Farming Research Foundation states that “many organic growers feel that transgenic crops are a direct threat to their way of farming and their livelihood. That’s what has motivated a lot of our concern . . . organic advocates are now in a position where fighting the proliferation of agricultural biotechnology is a focal point of our professional lives” (www.ofrf.org/policy/acab.html). The Organic Consumers Association is confident that consumer agitation is “driving a stake through the heart of the Frankenfoods monster” (www.purefood.org/newsletter/ biod23.cfm). The Center for Food Safety, an industry association, lists its first priority as “ensuring the testing, labeling and regulation of genetically engineered food.” Other relevant sites are Food Alert (www.gefoodalert.org), Friends of the Earth (www.foei.org), Food First (www.foodfirst.org), Pesticide Action Network of North America (www.panna.org), and the Soil Association (www. soilassociation.org). Contrary to the claims made on these website, the safety of GM food has been warranted by many competent authorities, viz, the USDA, the EPA, the FDA, Canadian Health, Australian Health, the EU, the OECD, the UN Food and Agriculture Program, the National Research Council, the Royal Society, the American Medical Association, the British Medical Association. In its 2002 publication The Environmental Effects of Transgenic Plants: The Scope and Adequacy of Regulation, the National Academy of Sciences found that transgenic plants “present no new categories of risk compared to conventional method of crop improvement but that special traits

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introduced by both methods can pose unique risks” (5). It recommends that the effects of deliberate release be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. 15. The EU Council commissioned 81 scientific studies of the safety of GM food and received a positive report in 2001. The Council’s leadership decided on this basis to lift the ban on the importation of GM products, but a minority of the Council blocked the decision. The U.S. position on agbiotech argued to the EU is stated on the website of the U.S. mission to the EU (www.useu.be). For the EU’s acceptance of the safety of agbiotech, see http:europa.eu.int/comm./ research/quality-of-life/gmo/index.html.

References Alcock, J. (2001). The Triumph of Sociobiology. New York: Oxford University Press. Avery, D. (1995). Saving the planet with pesticides: Increasing food supplies while preserving the Earth’s biodiversity. In R. Bailey (Ed.), Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet, pp. 49–82. New York: Free Press. Badcock, C. (2000). Evolutionary Psychology: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Polity Press. Bailey, R. (Ed.). (2000). Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bloom, H. (2000). The Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. New York: Wiley. Boulding, K. E. (1978). Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Societal Evolution. Sage: Beverly Hills. Browne, W. P. (1998). Private Interests, Public Policy, and American Agriculture. Lawrence, KA: University of Kansas Press. Caldwell, L. K. (1990). Between Two Worlds: Science, the Environmental Movement, and Policy Choice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Diesendorf, M. and C. Hamilton. (1996). Human Ecology, Human Economy: Ideas for an Ecologically Sustainable Future. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Dunlap, R., F. H. Buttel, and P. Dickens (Eds.). (2002). Sociological Theory and the Environment. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Easterbrook, G. (1996). A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism. New York: Penguin. Efron E. (1985). The Apocalyptics: How Environmental Politics Controls What We Know About Cancer. New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. Homer-Dixon, T. H. (2001). Environment, Scarcity, and Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Irons, W. and L. Cronk. (2000). Two decades of a new paradigm. In L. Cronk, N. Chagnon, and W. Irons (Eds.), Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective, pp. 3–26. Chicago: Aldine de Gruyter.


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Kane, M. (2001). GMO regulations: Food safety or trade barrier? In G. C. Nelson (Ed.), Genetically Modified Organisms in Agriculture: Economics and Politics, 233–238. New York: Academic Press. Krimsky, S. (1991). Biotechnics and Society: The Rise of Industrial Genetics. Westport, CN: Praeger. Krimsky, S. and R. Wrubel. (1996). Agricultural Biotechnology and the Environment: Science, Policy, and Social Issues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lomborg, G. (2001). The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. New York: Cambridge University Press. MacNeill, J., P. Winsemius, and T. Yakushiji. (1991). Beyond Interdependence: The Meshing of the World’s Economy and the Earth’s Ecology. New York: Oxford University Press. Malinowski, M. J. (1999). FDA regulation of biotechnology products for human use. In T. H. Murray and M. J. Melman (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Ethical, Legal and Policy Issues in Biotechnology, vol. 1, pp. 215–226. New York: Wiley. Masters, R. D. (1989). The Nature of Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press. McCormick, J. (1989). Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McGuffin, P., B. Riley, and R. Plomin. (2001). Toward behavioral genomics. Science 291 (16 February): 1232–1249. McNeill, J. R. (2000). Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Century World. New York: Norton. Milbrath, L. (1989). Envisioning a Sustainable Society. Albany: SUNY. Miller, H. I. (1997). On the Eighth Day: Policy Controversy in Biotechnology: An Insider’s View. New York: Academic Press. Murray, T. H and M. J. Mehlman (Eds.). (1999). Encyclopedia of Ethical, Legal and Policy Issues in Biotechnology, 2 vols. New York: Wiley. Nelson, G. C. (Ed.). (2001). Genetically Modified Organisms in Agriculture. New York: Academic Press. Nesse, R. M. and G. C. Williams. (1996). Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine. New York: Vintage. Odum, E. P. (1953). Ecology: A Bridge Between Science and Society. New York: Sinauer. Patterson, L. A. (2000). Biotechnology policy. In H. Wallace and W. Wallace (Eds.), Policy-Making in the European Union, pp. 317–344. New York: Oxford University Press. Perrings, C. (1997). Economics of Ecological Resources. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Segerstråle, U. (2000). Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press. Simon, J. L. (Ed.). (1995). The State of Humanity. Oxford: Blackwells. Smith, J. W., G. Lyons, and E. Moore. (1998). Global Meltdown: Immigration, Multiculturalism, and National Breakdown in the New World Disorder. Westport, CT: Praeger.

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Somit, A. and S. A. Peterson. (1997). Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy: The Biological Basis of Authoritarianism. Westport, CT: Praeger. Thompson, P. B. (1997). Food Biotechnology in Ethical Perspective. London: Chapman & Hall. Tiger, L. (2000). The Decline of Males: The First Look at an Unexpected New World for Men and Women. New York: Griffin Trade Paperback. Tokar, B. (1997). Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environment. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Wagner, W. E. (1999). Federal policy making for biotechnology, Congress, EPA. In T. H. Murray and M. J. Mehlman (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Ethical, Legal and Policy Issues in Biotechnology, vol. 1, pp. 227–234. New York: Wiley. White, E. (Ed.). (1981). Sociobiology and Politics. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Wilkinson, R. G. (1973). Poverty and Progress: An Ecological Model of Economic Development. London: Methuen. Willmer, P., G. Stone, and I. Johnson. (2000). Environmental Physiology of Animals. Oxford: Blackwell. Wright, S. (1994). Molecular Politics: Developing American and British Regulatory Policy for Genetic Engineering, 1972–1982. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 13

Ethnic Conflict and State Building Bradley A. Thayer

Introduction

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idespread ethnic conflict since the end of the Cold War has generated great concern from academics and policymakers. They seek to understand the causes of ethnic conflict so that they may develop policies that prevent it from occurring or stop it where it is ongoing. This chapter explores the contribution the Evolutionary Model makes toward an understanding of the causes of ethnic conflict.1 I argue that evolutionary theory allows us to understand its origins. It explains two behaviors—xenophobia and ethnocentrism—that contribute to ethnic conflict. I explain the evolutionary foundation for each behavior and the implications for policymakers. Understanding the evolutionary origins of ethnic conflict permits the creation of more effective policies aimed at preventing and stopping ethnic conflict. After this discussion, I explain briefly how my argument permits more effective state-building policies to be developed. The thrust of this argument is that, when the international community has the opportunity to form states, they should be created with great sensitivity to the ethnic composition of the population. At the outset of this chapter, it is important to explain why ethnic conflict is an important issue to study. First, ethnic conflicts often generate great human rights abuses and humanitarian disasters. The slaughter of one million Tutsi and moderate Hutus in Rwanda and the widespread ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia demonstrate the need to understand ethnic conflict (Burg and Shoup, 1999; des Forges, 1999; Prunier, 1997;

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Taylor, 1999).2 The ethnic cleansing conducted in Rwanda and in the states of the former Yugoslavia have received significant attention from the world’s media, but unfortunately such incidents are far from unique. Nonetheless it gave rise to discussions of “compassion fatigue” in Western nations, and forces one to recall Stalin’s sardonic comment that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. In addition, since the end of the Cold War the frequency of ethnic conflict has increased, with conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kosovo, Liberia, Macedonia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Turkey.3 Despite the widespread ethnic conflict and genocide in the twentieth century, it is not a new phenomenon in world history. Second, these conflicts often are of great concern to the creators of U.S. foreign policy because they can affect neighboring states, as the conflict in Kosovo affected the Albanian minority in Macedonia, presenting the risk that the conflict would escalate to neighboring states such as Greece and Turkey. This in turn might adversely influence NATO and the U.S. presence in Europe. Ethnic conflicts also can directly affect U.S. interests by undermining an important U.S. ally, such as Turkey in its clashes with the Kurds. Moreover, ethnic conflict is now receiving even greater attention from U.S. policymakers. In the spring of 1999, after the United States had intervened with Operation Allied Force in the battle over Kosovo with the Republic of Yugoslavia, the Clinton administration declared a change of U.S. policy that became known as the “Clinton Doctrine” (Mandelbaum, 1999).4 The essence of the doctrine, one of Clinton’s few major foreign policy proclamations, was that the United States and NATO will use force to advance and protect universal values such as the prevention of ethnic conflict, instead of the narrower national interests for which states traditionally fight. In addition, the doctrine authorized military intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states to protect those values. In September 1999, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan echoed this position when he announced that the U.N. would recognize the sovereignty only of states that supported human rights. However, the Clinton doctrine was stillborn. After being announced it was quickly abandoned when the administration saw how little support it had among Congress, the Pentagon, or the U.S. foreign policy community. Nonetheless, the doctrine is important because it revealed the thinking of the Clinton administration. Despite some apprehension in Washington and among the Europeans, the administration of George W. Bush has not withdrawn U.S. forces from obligations incurred by the Clinton administration. It has deepened the commitment to Macedonia, and indeed has extended

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them with its involvement in Afghanistan and other states as part of the war on terrorism. Thus it is following the Clinton administration’s willingness to intervene in deed, if not always in its rhetoric. For these reasons, ethnic conflict is a major issue in international politics and U.S. foreign policy, making it crucial to understand its complex and often multifaceted origins. It is the result of cultural, economic, historical, political, social, and evolutionary causes, the last of which has received little attention from scholars. Referring to the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, President Bill Clinton said that a bright future for humanity is threatened “by the oldest problem of human society: our tendency to fear and dehumanize people who are different from ourselves” (New York Times, 1999). Clinton has identified a central problem concerning the origins of ethnic conflict. Xenophobia— the fear of strangers—and ethnocentrism—the belief that members of one’s own ethnic group are superior or preferable—exist among almost all peoples, and both contribute to the ubiquity and scale of ethnic violence. Evolutionary theory permits students of ethnic conflict to understand its causes in a more detailed and sophisticated manner.5 The Evolutionary Model’s Explanation of Ethnic Conflict In this section I explain why two behaviors—xenophobia and ethnocentrism—contributed to fitness in the course of human evolution. First, evolutionary theory explains why xenophobia would evolve in human ancestors, why people can be manipulated by elites, and why the appeals of devious politicians who demonize other national groups can resonate so powerfully in the proper circumstances. Yet it is equally true that xenophobic beliefs can be changed to a considerable degree if a state will make determined and consistent efforts to do so. Thus, xenophobic beliefs may be reduced and the danger of ethnic conflict lessened. Second, evolutionary theory also allows us to understand ethnocentrism and its power as a source of ethnic conflict. It delineates why people often respond when elites incite hatred of other ethnic groups. These and similar appeals will echo compellingly in the right conditions because of the force of distinctions based on nationality and ethnicity. My objective is to analyze how evolutionary theory can explain the ultimate causes of xenophobia and ethnocentrism. Two points are important here. First, we must always bear in mind the naturalistic fallacy: while the ultimate cause of a given behavior may be explained by evolutionary theory, it does not follow that the behavior is acceptable or the right way to behave

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in today’s environment. Evolutionary theory allows us to study these behaviors, understand their origins by explaining how they contributed to fitness in the past, and apply these insights to the debate over ethnic conflict. But it does not and cannot inherently legitimize governmental policies. Second, we must also bear in mind the impact of the environment on human behavior. Human evolution has caused individuals to engage in certain behaviors. Few would doubt that eating, sleeping, and engaging in sexual intercourse are the product of evolution. I argue that xenophobic and ethnocentric behaviors are also the products of evolution. The Evolutionary Model can explain these behaviors, but an equally critical point here is that environment can suppress or exacerbate them. One’s culture, politics, religion, and ideology all influence one’s behavior, and just as an individual can suppress hunger or sexual desire at certain times, on occasions dictated by culture, for example, so too he can control these behaviors.

Understanding Xenophobia Xenophobia is widely found in the animal kingdom. Indeed, most species aggress against conspecifics, and most are territorial, as many dog and cat owners know from observation (Holloway, 1974; Southwick et al., 1974; Willhoite, 1977). The near universality of these behaviors suggests that they evolved in the distant past. The empirical evidence for this is widely documented by ethologists and biologists and is so strong as to be overwhelming (van der Dennen, 1987; van Hooff, 1990). David Barash has found in his studies of humans and other animals that “both . . . tend to reserve their most ferocious aggression toward strangers” (Barash, 1977: 219). Biologist John Fuller concludes: “xenophobia is as characteristic of humans as of ants, mice or baboons” (Fuller, 1978: 111). Physiologist Jared Diamond argues that “xenophobic murder has innumerable animal precursors,” and humans are unique in being the only species to have developed the weapons necessary for killing at a distance (Diamond, 1992: 220–221). After a comprehensive review of xenophobia in animals, Johan van der Dennen concludes that it “is a widespread trait throughout the animal kingdom,” one that helps to “maintain the integrity of the social group” and “ensures that group members will be socially familiar” (van der Dennen, 1995: 457–458). While xenophobia is present in many animals, it is important to explain why the trait would also evolve and be maintained in humans. Why would fear of strangers and perceptions of them as threats exist in the repertoire of human behavior? The answer to this question begins with the concept of “inclusive fitness” as outlined in chapter 1. Using egoism and inclusive


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fitness as a theoretical foundation, there are four reasons why xenophobia would contribute to the fitness of our human ancestors. First, in the Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene eras, humans lived in extended family bands that aggressed against or protected themselves from rival human bands as well as against large carnivores, such as wolves or hyenas. However, strangers were likely to be unrelated and were likely to be competitors for scarce resources and perhaps also a threat to the group (Peck, 1990). Diamond argues that competition for territory and other scarce resources is a central cause of human xenophobia: “Humans compete with each other for territory, as do members of most animal species. Because we live in groups, much of our competition has taken the form of wars between adjacent groups, on the model of the wars between ant colonies” (Diamond, 1992: 220). He continues, “as with adjacent groups of wolves and common chimps, relations of adjacent human tribes were traditionally marked by xenophobic hostility,” which was “intermittently relaxed to permit exchanges of mates (and, in our species, of goods as well)” (1992: 220). Second, xenophobia would be a mechanism of defense against communicable diseases, often caused by contact with strangers as the diseases they carried encountered a virgin population (McNeill, 1976). Humans were intelligent and would have recognized the powerful effect of disease, judging from the history of European encounters with the rest of the world during the Age of Discovery and after. Indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia, and the New World understood quickly that disease affected the Europeans themselves. They could comprehend quite easily that Europeans died in considerable quantities in Africa and Asia. In the New World, Native Americans comprehended rapidly that Europeans and their African slaves brought pestilence even if they did not realize how diseases were transmitted. Moreover, the cultural histories of many societies are rife with stories about a stranger or groups of strangers bringing pestilence. In these traditions, a stranger or strangers were associated with harm or evil that affected the community. Third, because humans are the only species to kill conspecifics at a distance, fear of strangers may have been accelerated as warriors introduced weapons of ever-increasing technological sophistication: the spear, the atlatl, and ultimately the bow and arrow. Armed with weapons, even a single individual, to say nothing of a group, would greatly increase the threat posed to another individual, especially if he were separated from his group. Weapons probably brought about the first revolution in warfare by allowing one human to kill another, even a stronger one, with less risk to himself since he longer had to engage the other in close proximity with his fists or even a club. Given this technology and the necessity of hunting and foraging to survive,

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it would be beneficial to stay in one’s group if possible so the members could help fight off an attack. It would be equally useful to be able to recognize group members and extra-group members quickly and from as far away as possible (McEachron et al., 1982: 134). Fourth, a stranger might also be a threat to one’s position in the dominance hierarchy. Most social mammals organize themselves in such hierarchies. Ethologists argue that these hierarchies evolve because they aid in defense against predators, promote the harvesting of resources, and reduce intragroup conflict.6 Hierarchies are needed largely because a species that lives communally has two choices: it can either accept organization with some centralization of power, or engage in perpetual conflict over scarce resources, leading to potential injury and depriving the group of the benefits of a communal existence such as more efficient resource harvesting. The ubiquity of this social ordering strongly suggests that it contributes to fitness. Donald McEachron and Darius Baer suggest that strangers would have to find a place in the dominance hierarchy, which might entail conflict especially among those displaced by the inclusion of the new member (McEachron et al., 1982: 134–135). Such readjustments are certainly possible, although cleavages or internecine conflict in the group might lead some to seek the stranger as an ally. Given these conditions, humans would consider other humans a threat and thus would rarely tolerate strangers. Low tolerance of strangers, or xenophobia, contributed to fitness and thus spread. As human communities grew larger, multiple groups would have reproduced, some containing genotypes that resulted in an increased suspicion of strangers. These genotypes would increase fitness by increasing the survival of the group over time. However, like much of human behavior, xenophobia may be augmented or weakened by psychological and cultural forces. For these reasons, xenophobia contributes to fitness and thus explains why humans may react negatively to people with different morphological features, such as facial traits or skin color. If the genetic difference is physical, then identification of difference is obvious, such as that between Africans and Europeans, but xenophobia can be triggered even by small differences between neighboring tribes or populations, as Richard Alexander and Falger suggest (Alexander, 1979: 126–127; Falger, 1987). While Alexander acknowledges that the causes of intense xenophobic reactions are complex, he explains, “it is possible that morphological differences alone make different countenances more or less communicative” (Alexander, 1979: 127). For example, Slavs typically have broad faces and Anglo-Saxons narrow ones; Tutsis tend to be tall, and Hutus short. Both Gérard Prunier and


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Christopher Taylor studied the 1994 genocide and found that the physical differences were tragically important because they allowed easier identification of Tutsis by the radical Hutus who were responsible for the genocide (Prunier, 1997: 5–9, 249; Taylor, 1999: 40–41).7 These differences facilitate a type of discrimination that could not exist between people who are morphologically very similar such as Irish Catholics and Protestants or Norwegians and Swedes, all of whom would likely have to listen to each other to determine who is who. Still, visible or auditory cultural differences even between similar groups might provoke a xenophobic reaction. As Diamond explains, “xenophobia comes especially naturally to our species, because so much of our behavior is culturally rather than genetically specified, and because cultural differences among human populations are so marked” (Diamond, 1992: 220). As a result, “those features make it easy for us, unlike wolves and chimps, to recognize members of other groups at a glance by their clothes or hair style” and react negatively to them (1992: 220).

Insights from the Evolutionary Explanation of Xenophobia for Policymakers Recognizing the evolutionary causes of xenophobia is useful for policymakers studying ethnic conflict because it supports a scientific foundation for understanding the cause of xenophobia and why it will be widespread. Combating xenophobia is crucial to stopping ethnic conflict in international politics. One mechanism for lessening xenophobia is to change conceptions of national identity. In essence, the goal is to make strangers, the “Other,” the “Self.” That is, make strangers part of the nation. States can bring about such a change through governmental policies. The use of the educational system can be particularly important. This is because of the sheer number of people who receive public education and because those educated are young and thus easier to influence with new a conception of national identity provided by educators and textbooks in primary and secondary education. Indeed, in many multiethnic states like France, India, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the public education system is used to promote racial and ethnic integration. Although this is certainly not accomplished overnight, the use of the educational system to combat xenophobia is likely to be effective as the students mature and change discourse and opinion about the acceptability of xenophobia beliefs. The importance of the educational system was noted by the authors of the December 2001 “Cantle Report” on racial cohesion published by Great Britain’s Home Office. This Report stressed the increasing

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polarization of Britain’s white and ethnic minority communities following ethnic disturbances that year in Bradford, Burnley, and Oldham. It noted that whites and minorities were leading “parallel lives” without significant interaction between communities, and suggested ensuring that schools be ethnically mixed so young people experience classmates of other ethnic backgrounds (United Kingdom Home Office, 2001: 16–17, 33–37). In addition to the governmental policies, the media, film industry, and other opinion makers can play important roles as well in efforts to broaden the definition of the group to include outsiders by remaking state identity (Snyder and Ballentine, 1996). This has been done in the United States, where identity has been changing over the past generation. For example, blacks rarely appeared on American television before the 1970s but this has changed dramatically as a result of decisions made by the media and Hollywood to increase black representation on the screen in an effort to change white perceptions of blacks and of American identity.8 In Germany, the Social Democrats are making similar attempts to change the common conception of “Who Is a German” to include the Turkish and other minorities. Of course, to bring about such change is difficult because xenophobia is a powerful trait, because it is inherently hard to create a consistent message, and of course because other groups in society may create countervailing messages. It is possible to suppress xenophobia, but the difficulty of such a task should not be underestimated.

Understanding Ethnocentrism Like xenophobia, inclusive fitness explains why ethnocentrism would contribute to fitness in human evolutionary history, and thus evolve in humans.9 As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, ethnocentrism is commonly defined as a belief in the superiority of one’s own ethnicity. Yet, defined this way, ethnocentrism would seem to have no evolutionary foundation as a belief. After all, one may hold many beliefs—that the earth is flat or that it is round, or that Roman Emperor Augustus was poisoned or that he died of natural causes—and these beliefs have no effect on fitness. So it might seem that evolutionary theory has little explanatory traction for ethnocentrism. Now let us try a more precise definition of ethnocentrism: it is a collection of traits that predispose the individual to show discriminatory preferences for groups with the closest affinities to the self. Now the contribution of evolutionary theory becomes clear (Vine, 1987: 60–80).10 Here evolutionary theory can explain why ethnocentrism is common among


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people: because it stems from inclusive fitness. Thus the phenomenon of ethnocentrism has it origins not merely in one’s random beliefs or opinions, but in human evolution. Of course, even with its foundation in human evolution, ethnocentrism—like xenophobia and almost all behavior—is open to considerable environmental manipulation. It may be either suppressed or supported by cultural, religious, or political beliefs and authorities (Dunbar, 1987: 56). I made this the basis for the preceding argument, in discussing the evolution of xenophobia, but will briefly restate the central arguments here. Since our genus Homo first evolved in the Pliocene, humans have favored those who are biologically related. In general, the closer the relationship, the greater the preferential treatment. The vast majority of animals behave in this way, and humans were not different in our evolution. In a world of scarce resources and many threats, the evolutionary process would select nepotism, thus promoting the survival of the next generation. This process is relative however. Parents are more willing to provide for their own children than for the children of relatives, or rarely for those of strangers. The essence of an inclusive fitness explanation of ethnocentrism, then, is that individuals generally should be more willing to support, privilege, and sacrifice for their own family, then their more distant kin, their ethnic group, and then others, such as a global community, in decreasing order of importance. That people are more willing to sacrifice for their family than for strangers or a larger community is obvious. In contrast, an individual like Mother Theresa is saintly. Her willingness to suffer and sacrifice for strangers throughout her lifetime is both noble and lamentable because her actions illustrate what we already know: few people are willing to sacrifice to help strangers who require great care due to endemic poverty and debilitating illness. Also important for explaining ethnocentrism is offered by Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt. He draws on Erik Erikson’s concept of “cultural pseudospeciation,” and submits that in almost all cultures humans form subgroups usually based on kinship; these “eventually distinguish themselves from others by dialect and other subgroup characteristics and go on to form new cultures” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1998: 41). An unfortunate result of this process is that people tend to perceive others as increasingly distant, from distant cousins, to foreigners with strange customs and language. Ultimately they may even see them as less than human, as another species: animals (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1998: 42–46). Edward Wilson echoes this argument when he writes that ethnocentrism is the “force behind most warlike policies” (Wilson, 1978: 111). This is so because “primitive men divide the world into

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two tangible parts, the near environment of home, local villages, kin, friends, tame animals, and witches, and the more distant universe of neighboring villages, intertribal allies, enemies, wild animals, and ghosts” (1978: 111). This “elemental topography makes easier the distinction between enemies who can be attacked and killed and friends who cannot. The contrast is heightened by reducing enemies to frightful and even sub-human status” (1978: 111). Of course, while few scholars would doubt that ethnocentrism is a powerful force, we should not overestimate its power. It obviously can be offset, suppressed, or reconciled by other environmental pressures. Although it is important not to overestimate the power of ethnocentrism, it would also be a mistake to underestimate its contributions to ethnic conflict. When an individual considers whether to support a larger group, several metrics are available. One of these—and I stress only one—is ethnocentrism, a continuation of one’s willingness to sacrifice for one’s family because of the notion of common kinship. The ways humans determine their relations with unrelated individuals are complex, but key factors are physical resemblance, as well as environmental causes like shared culture, history, and language.

Insights from the Evolutionary Explanation of Ethnocentrism for Policymakers Evolutionary theory helps explain why people hold ethnocentric beliefs. As with xenophobia, the evolutionary explanation of ethnocentric behavior improves our understanding. We are able to understand why the masses are well prepared by human evolution to have their ethnocentric strings pulled by the elite. They will more readily identity with a diaspora community because they see that community as being similar to themselves, part of an extended, albeit fictitious, family who resemble one another, as well as perhaps possessing shared culture, history, and language. This provides an explanation of why people identify with a nation and thus often see the nation as family. It also yields an explanation of why elites in many cultures and eras can manipulate the masses using the common theme of ethnic or national identity. An implication for multiethnic states is that they will be vulnerable to appeals for division made along ethnic lines, a point well demonstrated in the 1990s with the breakup of both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and widespread ethnic conflict from Rwanda to East Timor. The significance of this insight increases when we realize that most states in international politics are multiethnic and many are multiracial. In sum, there is a significant danger posed by aspects of identity, such as ethnicity or race, which are difficult to


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change. This insight is not diminished if we also recognize that in order to get the ethnocentric string to resonate, someone must pluck it: an external actor must play a major role in causing ethnic conflict. We are able understand why devious politicians or political parties can manipulate people time and again. The fuel is the human ability to generate readily ethnocentric distinctions. This fuel may aid political parties or leaders to gain or maintain power through social imperialism—dividing the body politic into “us” against “them.” The explanation of ethnocentrism allows scholars of ethnic conflict to understand why the masses are receptive to such manipulation by these elites. This situation, of course, is made worse when no countervailing pressures come from the domestic or international media, other states, or international society. Understanding the evolutionary origin of ethnocentrism also illuminates two partial solutions to ethnic conflict. First, exogamy is a powerful mechanism for reducing ethnocentric beliefs because intermarriage between nations reduces ethnocentrism. Exogamy for three or four generations of 25 percent or more will typically erode both the racial and physical attributes of nations—such as the height difference between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda (van den Berghe, 1995: 361). These differences can only remain as long as interbreeding remains relatively infrequent, as in Rwanda where a rigid caste system hindered exogamy. However, the United States is a strong example of widespread intermarriage between nations, what Americans usually call ethnic groups. In the United States it has lessened national, that is, interethnic tensions that existed in the country’s past—for example, with the Irish or Italian immigrants in the last half of the nineteenth century, or Eastern European immigrants in the early twentieth century. To be sure, exogamy is only a partial and imperfect solution to the problem of ethnic conflict. The messages of civil society, the media, and political leaders, as well as economic conditions and opportunity are also significant, but scholars already understand them as potential solutions to ethnic conflict. Exogamy is not perfect for three reasons. First, it is not a policy that the government can advocate in a free society. So there will be little the government can do explicitly to advance this solution. Second, as the example of the former Yugoslavia shows, the high rates of interethnic marriage between Bosnian Croats, Muslims, and Serbs, could not guarantee the state’s stability. Other environmental forces clearly identified by the modernist paradigm can overwhelm even familial loyalties in the right circumstances. Third, new problems can arise or people can create new different distinctions to divide themselves from others. As Bosnian Croats intermarry with Serbs, or Irish Americans with Italian Americans, new ethnocentric beliefs may well surface.

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Psychological experiments suggest that people can draw almost infinite numbers of very fine distinctions between their group and others (Tajfel, 1981). Lamentably, there is no easy solution to the problem of ethnocentrism as a contributing cause of ethnic conflict. Second, for those who seek to stop ethnic conflict, the development of governmental policies and use of the media and film industry discussed earlier in the analysis of xenophobia are important here as well. In addition, civil society is another important variable in combating ethnocentrism. As eminent social theorist Robert Putnam argues, it is possible to have smaller, integrated groups like churches, clubs, and local organizations that create “social capital,” the contacts that affect the productivity and cohesion of a society. Where social capital is strong, a dense network of reciprocal social relations exists as people participated in clubs and local sports, visited friends and relatives, volunteered in local organizations. In consequence, racial and ethnic cooperation is promoted and the creation of a new multiethnic and multiracial America identity is aided (Putnam, 2000). While the government cannot create civil society, it may take specific measures to encourage participation in local communities through the use of the arts and public service announcements asking Americans to spend less leisure time in front of the television and more time engaged with other citizens. Clearly, if these efforts were augmented by the media and film industry, the message would be stronger, more consistent, and thus progress might be faster. Evolutionary theory makes an important contribution to understanding the force of xenophobia or ethnocentrism, but this recognition does not prevent us from acknowledging other sources of one’s identity or cooperative behavior, such as friendship, fealty to one’s alma mater, or identification with a person’s economic and social class. Thus, if identity can be broadened to include ethnic outsiders, then ethnic identity will have less power as a cause of ethnic conflict. The Evolutionary Model’s Insights for State Building The evolutionary model’s lessons for state building flow from its insights into the causes of ethnic conflict. When the United Nations or the United States has an opportunity to create or rebuild states, such as after a war or in the wake of the break up of multiethnic empires like the Soviet Union or of multiethnic states like Yugoslavia, these lessons should be incorporated into policy. A fundamental lesson is that ethnic conflict has evolutionary origins and so cannot be eliminated. Certainly, it may be suppressed successfully. But its


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evolutionary ultimate cause ensures that cannot be eradicated except, perhaps, over an evolutionary timeframe. Consequently, the international community must pay particular attention to its triggers, the specific structural, political, economic, and cultural factors that may spark an ethnic conflict, in order to prevent it from occurring. Regrettably, despite the best efforts of states and nongovernmental organizations, ethnic conflict will happen and when it does the international community must work to suppress it through the policy tools available to it, including economic sanctions, ethnic partition, the promotion of an independent media, and military intervention. Because the causes of ethnic conflict cannot be fully eliminated when the United States or the United Nations has the opportunity to state build it should heed the lessons of the evolutionary explanation of ethnic conflict. Based on the understanding of the causes of ethnic conflict provided by evolutionary theory, a criterion for state building should be to ensure ethnic homogeneity where this is possible. Obviously, multiethnic states face greater danger of instability due to ethnic conflict than do ethically homogenous states. When we recognize that ethnic conflict has evolutionary origins, it is clear that ethnic conflict remains a constant, if often latent, danger for multiethnic states. I stress that this is only one important criterion. Clearly, the relative importance of ethnic homogeneity must be weighed against other goals established by the United States and the international community, such as the effect on the stability of neighboring states and the economic viability of the state. In addition to considering other goals, it is important to note that a criterion of ensuring ethnic homogeneity where possible is one that is difficult for the United States to accept for ideological reasons. The remaking of American identity since the 1960s by the cultural and media elite has stressed a multicultural, multiethnic America, rather than a unicultural American identity that was dominant before. Thus, advancing an argument for an ethnic homogenous state is not likely to be done explicitly by a U.S. administration. Nonetheless, the United States has accepted ethnic partition in the past, although it was loathe to call it that. The Clinton administration hailed the 1995 Dayton Accord because it maintained Bosnia-Herzegovina as a multiethnic state rather than allowing its ethnic groups to break apart and establish independent states. However, what was widely recognized at the time of the agreement was that it permitted the de facto partition of BosniaHerzegovina into two parts. It established the Republika Srpska for the Bosnian Serbs, and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croatians.

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Conclusion In this chapter I have shown that evolutionary theory can significantly advance the scholarly understanding of the origins of ethnic conflict. Evolutionary theory permits students of ethnic conflict to understand two human behaviors: why humans can be xenophobic and ethnocentric. Moreover, by comprehending the origins of these behaviors scholars and policymakers can better understand ethnic conflict in order to prevent it from occurring. As a result, evolutionary theory makes a contribution to the study of ethnic conflict. Armed with a better explanation for the fundamental causes of ethnic conflict, we can better explain the origins of these conflicts, and why they are relatively common, without asserting that the cause is an ancient hatred. Indeed, I suggest we must also consider evolutionary theory to be an underlying cause of ethnic conflict, just as important as the structural, political, economic, or cultural factors that are often identified by scholars working in the SSSM. While it is important to recognize the contribution of evolutionary theory, I also want to reiterate what evolutionary theory does not do. It does not offer proximate explanations of ethnic conflict. In order to understand the causes of a particular ethnic conflict, one has to use the analytical tools provided by other approaches. For example, evolutionary theory will not explain the specific ethnic conflicts in Afghanistan or Kosovo. It will not explain the actions of the Kosovo Liberation Army or the Yugoslav national army in suppressing the KLA and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Nor will it explain the Clinton administration’s decision for war against Yugoslavia to stop the suffering of the ethnic Albanians. That said, evolutionary theory still makes a serious intellectual contribution to the study of ethnic conflict. Evolutionary theory assists social scientists by explaining ultimate causation not proximate causation. A medical analogy captures this point well. When a patient is suffering from pneumonia, a doctor treating the patient need not be concerned with human evolution—the ultimate causation—or the patient’s liver, an irrelevant proximate causation—or the patient’s skin disease. The doctor must focus upon the particular danger and not be concerned with ultimate causation, irrelevant proximate causation, or other less threatening ailments. So too a policymaker confronting a situation like Kosovo in March 1999 need not be concerned with the ultimate causes of ethnic conflict. The point is to stop the immediate progress of the disease. It is equally true, however, that a doctor’s complete understanding of human physiology allows him to keep more patients in good health. It allows


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him to recommend preventative care that lets the patient avoid illness or trauma in the future. When encountering an ill patient, his knowledge allows him to diagnose and categorize a patient’s illness so that effective treatment may follow and the patient returned to good health. So it is for those who study ethnic conflict. Understanding the causes of ethnic conflict, both ultimate and proximate, helps the scholar better predict the circumstances in which ethnic conflict may occur. He can then recommend to the policymaker certain courses of action that might prevent ethnic conflict from occurring, or when it does appear, advance policies to minimize the suffering of those afflicted. Recognizing that xenophobia and ethnocentrism contributed to fitness during human evolution allows us to understand why they continue to be ultimate causes of ethnic conflict. Thus ethnic conflict will likely recur as a social phenomenon, remaining, like war and peace, part of the fabric of international politics. Notes 1. This chapter is based on Thayer (2000, in press). 2. Alan Kuperman argues that even the best possible intervention—a large force at the beginning of the genocide—could have saved at best half of the ultimate victims (Kuperman, 2000). 3. An excellent overview of ethnic conflict in the post–Cold War world is found in Vanhanen, 1999. 4. For an insightful analysis of the causes and conduct of U.S. intervention in Kosovo see Layne, 2000; Daalder and O’Hanlon, 2000. Walt (2000) places the Kosovo intervention in the context of Clinton’s foreign policy achievements. 5. Scholars who have noted the evolutionary origins of these behaviors or the breadth of ethnocentrism among human populations include Brewer and Campbell, 1976; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1982; LeVine and Campbell, 1972; van den Berghe, 1981; van der Dennen, 1987; and Warnecke et al., 1992. 6. See Boone, 1992; and Moyer, 1987, for a summary of the ethological argument on this point. 7. Also see Barnett (2002: 49–50) and van den Berghe (1981: 73–74). Despite the physical differences, there were some cases of mistaken identity: “during the genocide some persons who were legally Hutu were killed as Tutsi because they looked Tutsi” (des Forges, 1999: 33). 8. Implicitly reflecting on the power of television and film images for creating in-group identity, New York Times editorialist Brent Staples notes that “movies in the contemporary United States tend to be rigorously multicultural, with black, Asian, and Latino faces streaming across the screen. But those faces become noticeably whiter when the time frame shifts backward.” He continues,

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“movie makers commonly treat the past as a place where black Americans did not exist.” As a result, “the movies have left the mistaken impression that heroism in the ‘greatest generation’ came exclusively with a white face” (Staples, 2001). 9. Excellent accounts are found in van der Dennen (1987: 8–17, 37–47), Dunbar (1987), and van den Berghe (1981: 18–36). Also insightful is Corning (2001: 60). 10. More formally, ethnocentrism is comprised of four discrete aspects of group behavior: in-group integration, the hyper-evaluation of the in-group, hostile relations between in-group and out-group, and derogatory stereotyping of out-group individuals and characteristics (Brewer and Campbell, 1976: 74).

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Taylor, Christopher C. (1999). Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994. New York: Berg. ——. (2000). Bringing in Darwin: Evolutionary theory, realism, and international politics. International Security 25: 124–151. Thayer, Bradley A. (In press). Bringing in Darwin: Evolutionary Theory and International Politics. United Kingdom Home Office. (2001). Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. www.homeoffice.gov.uk/reu/community_cohesion.pdf. van den Berghe, Pierre L. (1981). The Ethnic Phenomenon. New York: Elsevier. ——. (1995). Does race matter? Nations and Nationalism 1: 357–368. van der Dennen, Johan M. G. (1987). Ethnocentrism and in-group/out-group differentiation. In Vernon Reynolds, Vincent S. E. Falger, and Ian Vine (Eds.), The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism: Evolutionary Dimensions of Xenophobia, Discrimination, Racism and Nationalism. London: Croom Helm. ——. (1995). The Origin of War: The Evolution of a Male-Coalitional Reproductive Strategy. Groningen, Netherlands: Origin Press. van Hooff, J. A. R. A. M. (1990). Intergroup competition and conflict in animals and man. In J. van der Dennen and V. Falger (Eds.), Sociobiology and Conflict: Evolutionary Perspectives on Competition, Cooperation, Violence and Warfare. London: Chapman and Hall. Vanhanen, Tatu. (1999). Ethnic Conflicts Explained by Ethnic Nepotism. Stamford, CT: JAI Press. Vine, Ian. (1987). Inclusive fitness and the self-system. In Vernon Reynolds, Vincent S. E. Falger, and Ian Vine (Eds.), The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism: Evolutionary Dimensions of Xenophobia, Discrimination, Racism and Nationalism. London: Croom Helm. Walt, Stephen M. (2000). Two cheers for Clinton’s foreign policy. Foreign Affairs 79: 63–79. Warnecke, A. Michael, Roger D. Masters, and Guido Kempter. (1992). The roots of nationalism: Nonverbal behavior and xenophobia. Ethology and Sociobiology 13: 267–282. Willhoite, Fred H., Jr. (1977). Evolution and collective intolerance. The Journal of Politics 39: 667–684. Wilson, Edward O. (1978). On Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 14

Genetic and Cultural Evolution: Implications for International Security Policies J. David Singer

Introduction

A

t the 1986 meetings of the International Society for Research on Aggression, some of the leading lights there completed work on what came to be called the Seville Statement, named for the charming city in Spain in which we met. Given the strong mix of psychologists, ethologists, and biologists, it was a remarkable document, vigorously rejecting any suggestion that war waging is genetically innate in Homo sapiens, and therefore an inevitable and permanent covariate of the human condition. Rather, it was argued that “It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature” and “We conclude that biology does not condemn humanity to war.” Shifting from the negative to the positive, they recognized that while “We do have the neural apparatus to act violently, it is not automatically activated by internal or external stimuli. Like higher primates and unlike other animals, our higher neural processes filter such stimuli before they can be acted upon.” See Beroldi (1994) and Scott and Ginsburg (1994) for a more extensive debate about the merits of the Seville Statement on Violence. This was not, of course, the first such effort by high-minded and higheducated folks to question the innate and primordial explanation of war. We find an awesome bibliography reflecting this perspective, of which two

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sources seem germane in this immediate context. One is the exchange between Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, sponsored by the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations in 1927. Both of these titans seemed to agree that war need not bedevil humanity forever and that human intelligence could move us away from such destructive behavior. Equally clear and optimistic in its reading was the widely circulated essay by Margaret Mead (1940) under the title “Warfare is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity.” In response to this “behavioral” perspective and not yet familiar with the work of the more evolution-oriented and biologically inclined scholars, I found myself largely in the optimistic camp. This should, of course, come as no surprise, given that I had initiated in 1964 the long-running Correlates of War project, which rested four-square on the premise that the more we understand the factors most powerfully associated with the incidence of war, the better the chance that we could choose national security policies that avoided the historically demonstrated correlates of war. While I still favor this line of reasoning, it might be useful to step back and try to reevaluate the evidence of recent decades and ask whether our project might rest on a rather flimsy scientific foundation. The question might be put: how hardwired for war are the world’s human beings and what are the implications for international security policies? Genetic Evolution: HardWired for War As mentioned, the literature on human aggression and its link to war is voluminous, engaging biology, anthropology, ethology, neurology, and several of the fields of psychology (Dobzhansky, 1962). While some of this literature is data-based, experimental, and much of it resting on field studies of animals and various human groups, an alarming fraction is remarkably speculative. Moreover, a great deal of the writing is imprecise, permitting plenty of talking past one another as in the “exchange” between Konrad Lorenz (1966) and Erich Fromm (1964). The recent completion of a working map of the human genome makes the present an opportune moment in history to review what we have learned about the relationship among evolution, biology, and warfare, with profound implications for international security policies. A natural fear surfaces that war may be inevitable and humanity destined to destroy itself, but it is nearly impossible to find social scientists who would defend such a biologically deterministic viewpoint. However, the incredible amount of damage that representatives of Homo sapiens have inflicted upon one another throughout

Genetic and Cultural Evolution

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the recent centuries gives quite a cause for concern. As we begin to literally read our genetic code to find out why we so frequently resort to arms, what questions should we be asking? According to Lorenz (1966), from his innumerable observations of animals, history has selected for an “aggressiveness gene.” He argued that Darwinian genetic adaptations have historically contributed toward the creation of an innate aggressive drive that encourages organisms to fight members of their own species: “the most important function of rival fighting is the selection of an aggressive family defender.” He extolled the benefits of aggression as limiting procreation rights to the strongest competitors and spacing out individuals, thereby preventing overpopulation and resource exhaustion. Lorenz was by no means alone in outlining a biological basis for aggression. One example is the report of a team of animal behavior researchers to the 1971 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science observing that the capacity for violence in rhesus monkeys arises on its own. They claimed to be able to locate a particular phase of infancy when the monkeys learn how to restrain aggression, and controlled isolation during that phase would lead to extreme violence, even toward defenseless infants, when they were subsequently exposed to other monkeys. Louis Leakey has argued that while violence may be common between species, it is quite rare for it to take place in a systematic way within a species. In particular, there has been no incentive for human intra-specific violence until about 40,000 years ago, making it a relatively new phenomenon. He and other scientists (van der Dennen, 1990; Fromm, 1964) traced the roots of violence to the development of more sedentary civilizations. Population growth, resource competition, and even the realization of emotions such as hate, jealousy, and boredom have acted as mechanisms for facilitating aggression between humans. In other words, there is adequate evidence that an individual’s surrounding environment plays an evolutionary role in the generation of violence. However, it is important to realize that Lorenz, who championed the aggression-is-instinctive proposition, did not believe that we are biologically destined for war. He recognized that our tendency toward such violence is the greatest of all dangers and that we could scientifically investigate its causes, and thus overcome it. Similarly, Darwin’s concept of the “struggle for existence” has often been misrepresented as aggression-is-instinctive but his model of cultural evolution stressed the human capacity to control nature and transcend natural selection. In short, not only are biological laws not universal and not inescapable, but it would be over-cynical to claim that our

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biology condemns humanity to a dismal fate. The Seville Statement (1986) bluntly refutes the claim of a Darwinian legacy of violence: “It is scientifically incorrect to say that in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behavior more than for other kinds of behavior.” Groebel and Hinde (1989) cautioned us against the myth that “international war is closely related to, and even a direct consequence of, the aggressiveness of individuals.” Even if aggression has always been with us, mankind uniquely invented war by turning the weaponry of the hunt toward his fellow man in a systematized manner. Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1979) was particularly proficient at making the distinction between aggression and institutionalized war as did Lorenz; he observed the behavior of many animals and came to the conclusion that inter-individual aggression is innate in the species, and postulated that nearly all groups of vertebrates, except some amphibians, display aggressive behavior. But he also observed interesting internal restraints that keep animal fighting behavior from spiraling out of control. Fights between individuals of the same species rarely end in death, or serious injury to either combatant. Additionally, such all-out fights usually end when the loser escapes or “surrenders” by assuming a submissive posture that the winner respects. Often, an aggressive battle is waged when individual members of a species compare their strength based on posturing, movements, and noises, without dealing any serious harm to one another. One example is his portrayal of male rattlesnakes that fight by “Indian wrestling” although they could easily kill one another with a single venomous bite. Similarly, combat among male fallow deer involves ceremonial marching, and one male is careful not to strike unless his opponent is facing him. These checks on aggression ensure maximization of the benefits of aggression, spacing out the species, and selecting the fittest mates, without the disadvantages of destroying genetic material through murder. The rat and the mouse have generated particularly provocative evidence about the interplay of a species’ genetic characteristics and its environment. Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s (1979) tests on Norway rats showed that even when they are isolated before the age when they learn aggressive behavior, they fight in the same manner as do their “experienced” peers. They have innate instructions to perform their species-specific combat displays including arching their backs, gnashing their teeth, presenting their flanks, and uttering “ultrasonic” cries. He also found that interactions between rats that are raised together are largely peaceful, whereas, foreign rats that were introduced to such a group would be viciously attacked. Denenberg et al. (1963) conducted further controlled rodent experiments to explore how aggressive behavior is the result of the interaction between the environment and the genetic make-up


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of an organism. Knowing that rats tend to fight each other less than mice do, they artificially introduced mice into families of rats during their infancy, and found almost invariably that mice reared by rat mothers refused to attack other mice when placed in a confrontational fighting situation. To ensure that this was not the result of biochemical factors in rat milk supply, they found similar results in a group of mice raised with mouse mothers and rat “aunts” (maternally acting but nonlactating). These findings suggested to them that while species-specific behaviors have a strong underlying genetic basis, they can be modified dramatically or even not expressed at all by introducing appropriate social experiences early in life. How genetic tendencies are expressed depends on the nexus of environmental factors in which the organism grows and develops. If this interplay between nature and nurture in humans is at all similar to that in rats, we can realize that we are also much less likely to be violent toward our family and friends. The trick may be to convince ourselves that the human family has grown and now includes the entirety of our species, even as we recognize that at the same time, there probably is a certain level of aggression hardwired into our systems. We feel the hairs on the back of our necks rise and a tendency to want to raise our fists when threatened. Nonetheless, the intensity, severity, and motivation that go into warfare involve many factors that cannot be classified as written into the genetic code. To use the analogy of a game of cards, there is a genetic factor that determines what cards we are dealt, but there is also a distinctly “human” element that allows us to play the hand in a variety of ways. Our instinctual propensity to fight is counterbalanced not only by an instinctual desire for peace, but also a receptive part of ourselves that can be influenced by education and socialization. Therein lies the ability of society to overcome the hardwiring within our individual neural systems. This is not to deny the fact that human groups of varying sizes do indeed engage in collective acts of aggression that are not war. They can form a small mob to threaten or commit a hanging or other form of assault on another, they can form a raiding party for revenge or seizing captives, or they can form a larger aggregation that might range from a threatening demonstration to destroying buildings, to engage in a riot usually against another mob or the forces of “law and order.” At the extreme, they can engage in a massacre, continue it to constitute a pogrom, full-scale genocide or democide, and all the way up to well-organized, and ironically enough, often disciplined butchery. While none of those barbaric events is war—in the sense of conflict between two (or rarely, more) armed and organized collectives—some of the similarities are unmistakable; to that extent we can say that all humans have the capacity to engage in collective violence.

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Having summarized a small fraction of the evidence from several fields of research, it seems perfectly clear that the war potential is indeed in our genes, with rather dismal implications for the makers of foreign and military policies. All normal humans have the neural capacity to condone, support, and participate in war, not to mention such related activities as hatred, humiliation, physical punishment, rape, torture, homicide, and genocide. And not surprisingly, most of us are also capable of lying, cheating, and stealing. This is the bad news. On the other hand, most of us have the neural capacity for benevolence, altruism, love, empathy, helpfulness, honesty, gentleness, and the rest. If our genetic heritage is so rich—and ambivalent—in all these tendencies, the next question is whether one set of tendencies is typically more powerful or dominant. My reading is that—across the entire human race in this historical period—these warlike and peace-like tendencies are of approximately equal strength, recognizing of course that some of them will dominate in some individuals at birth and be weaker in others; this is nothing more than the apparently random distribution of biologically based propensities in a population of approximately 6 billion human beings. But we might nevertheless ask whether these distributions are indeed random, or whether on the other hand, we find systematic variation as a function of sex, age, race, region, ethnicity, and culture. Let me begin by asserting that sex turns out to be the most biologically based deviation from randomness in the human population (Goldstein, 2001). Without for a moment discounting the presence of plenty of women capable of not only indirect and verbal, but also reactive or proactive aggressive behavior of a physical sort, and thus a high propensity for armed conflict and war, the biological roots and evolutionary history of women inevitably makes them systematically less susceptible to the threats and blandishments of war (Wrangham and Peterson, 1996). And, for the record, we need to recognize age as another systematic deviation for the simple reason that small children and the elderly show a very low propensity for warlike behavior. Having said this, however, we should note that a combination of advanced technology and culture change is bringing us a rapidly increasing cohort of child soldiers in the less-developed regions of the world. When miniaturization makes it possible for ten-year-old boys (rarely girls, so far) to handle rapid fire assault weapons, when abject poverty and remarkable superstition leads parents to “give” children to combat, mine clearing, and suicide tactics, and ruthless leaders are happy to recruit them, this should come as no surprise. Similarly, males in their 60s and 70s will increasingly be able to engage in combat—at a greater distance and with physically less demanding


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weapons. But, this is not biologically innate; it is merely the rise and decline of anatomical strength and skills in every and all age cohorts. What is biologically innate, however—thanks to changes in testosterone levels—is the greater propensity of young males (aged approximately 16–30 in most cultures) to manifest more aggressive tendencies than those younger or older; this is, of course, also the age range of most armed forces, even as we note that the United States and many other governments have recently agreed to a multilateral convention designed to prohibit military recruitment before the age of 18. The next “obvious” dimension that might reveal clear intra-species variation as to the genetic predisposition to war has to be race, and the explanation is quite simple. People living in different regions of the world not only look different from one another; they also act different. Furthermore, there are demonstrable interregional differences in the frequency, magnitude, severity, and forms of war. As a matter of fact, we find some variation in the sense that some regions experience very little armed conflict in some epochs while others see high frequency and severity of war in the same epoch (Lemke, 2002). Notice, however, that these regions go through cycles and trends for both interstate and intrastate war, as a function of shifting political, economic, and technological conditions. As I write here in the year 2002, there is enough evidence to claim that the people of Western Europe and North America have given up the practice of war against their immediate neighbors since the mid-twentieth century, whereas those in the regions east and south have taken it up again within the final decade of that century and show every indication of continuing to do so for at least another half century. To what extent might these rather clear empirical regularities be attributed to “racial” differences in the biological sense of the word? The reader has probably already felt uncomfortable with this line of reasoning, not to mention the use of “race,” and the explanation need not be elusive. First, despite the obvious and visible differences in height, muscularity, hair type, complexion, and facial structure, most humans share over 99 percent of their genetic composition; this is not to deny physiological differences in appearance and in vulnerability to such illnesses as hypertension and sickle-cell anemia but to note that these differences are remarkably superficial and seem largely attributable to geographical environment, economic development, social class, and related dietary practices. Second, the incidence of war— intra- as well as interstate—can be more adequately explained in terms of their regions’ political and economic history. Most of the political entities in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East spent the better part of the past two centuries under European domination, achieving legal statehood only since the

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Second World War. Combined with the very recent experience in nationbuilding and state-building is the extent to which their resources are plundered and their economies tragically exploited, and that they are denied adequate means of production and transportation, and unable to gain from modern technologies, education, public health, or opportunities for reciprocally advantageous commerce. As we move from gender, age, and race, the next possible source of biological variation would be culture, understood in terms of ethnic identity, language, and religion (Montagu, 1978; Silverberg and Gray, 1992). While all of the human groupings around these three dimensions show some correlation with the racial groups, this is primarily again a function of region and locale, with virtually no genetic origin. This might be the place to introduce the importance of a psycho-cultural component known as impulsivity; what can be misleading is that the human population shows considerable variation in this neural propensity, while it is clear that cultural norms play a major role in the extent to which this tendency is inhibited or facilitated. This is another instance of the intimate interdependence of our neural propensities and their social context. The range of cultural variation is immense: impulsivity, spontaneity, self-inhibition, interpersonal distance, reliance on physical gestures, length of patience, tolerance, shortness of the frustration fuse, definition of honor, and so on. All of these cultural variations can help account for national security orientation in a given spatial–temporal domain, but would seem to have little or no genetic sources. In sum, we are all hardwired for agonistic and violent behavior; the neural capacity is undoubtedly there in most of us. On the other hand, and as noted earlier, there are several considerations that erode the inference that resort to force is always inevitable. First, we have all these other psychological propensities: cooperation, altruism, generosity, benevolence, tenderness, love, and the like. Second, there is a huge leap from individual propensities to collective behavior. Even if we are hardwired for aggressive behavior in pursuit of or defense of sex, mates, nourishment, shelter, or territory—which seems likely—we are still looking at an individual characteristic. And war is neither an individual act nor the aggregation of many individual acts; it is a collective social act, requiring the participation of many people responding to a complex set of sociocultural incentives and constraints. For the individual human capacity for, or the disposition toward, aggressive and violent behavior to be converted into collective, more or less organized combat, the range of further prerequisites is far from negligible. A good combat soldier needs to be socialized from early adolescence into the in-group–out-group norm, so that any innate “kinship recognition” gets sufficient reinforcement;


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in different epochs and different locales, the crucial in-group could be the primary family, the extended family, the clan, the tribe, the province, the religious or language collective, the social class, the ethnic or ideological identity group, and in modern times, usually the nation and/or the state— which are no longer necessarily identical. From there, the next step is the ability to translate different into better: those other people are not only different in their location, appearance, beliefs, and practices, but inferior to us on those dimensions. Next in the process is often the notion that those people are not only a different species, but an inferior one, and from this pseudo-speciation (Erickson, 1968) to sub-speciation, the inference that they may be dealt with under rules different from those followed in our civilized group is a relatively natural step. (Much of this is autobiographical as I was gradually converted from a gentle youngster who became patriotic via the Boy Scouts, physically aggressive via sandlot football, nationalistic enough to want to go to the U.S. Naval Academy and become a naval officer, energized by my family and friends’ reaction to anti-Semitism at home plus the atrocities of Nazi Germany, hostility toward the Japanese for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor “day that will live in infamy,” and fully mobilized to “go out and kill Japanese” through eight months of the U.S. Navy’s flight-prep school, complete with poison gas and bayonet drill. Fortunately, for myself and millions of others, the war ended a few months before I would have gone into combat, but I recall feeling very disappointed; I’d been socialized for war, but was denied the opportunity, generating a mild and brief period of frustration!) But translating the individual propensity for aggressive behavior into collective war behavior needs to do more than socialize the young combatants; we also need to socialize/indoctrinate others in the society. We need to persuade most of them that “the other” is a threat, that it is not only the motivation and incentive to threaten our honor and security (variously defined), but also the capabilities to do so. If we do this successfully—with the help of those in the education system, the media, the political parties, the entertainment industry, the churches, and of course those who stand to gain materially and socially, then there is little difficulty in persuading the citizenry to (1) send their kind into the military, (2) pay the taxes to finance preparedness, (3) minimize all sorts of environmental degradation, (4) acquiesce in the erosion of civil liberties, and (5) prepare to kill or die for their country. One must remark that in the United States, for example, despite the lingering “Vietnam syndrome,” most citizens continue to support outrageous “defense” budgets, pursuit of weapons systems that promise to jeopardize the

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nation’s security, reject international efforts to reduce violence, and oppose the general movement toward effective global institutions. So far, so bad, but it gets worse. With little effort—once the coalition (the military–industrial–academic–corporate–clerical–journalistic–labor– management complex) has been effectively mobilized, rewarded, and co-opted–there is the translation of this human predisposition into preparation for war, the rest of the process is all too familiar. Cultural Evolution: Softwired for War Where does this admittedly superficial survey leave us? We start with the rather clear evidence that our genetic evolution makes most humans neurologically and emotionally capable of making war; we have the necessary biology for war. But do we have the biological characteristics that are sufficient for war? In my judgment, enough of us do have the characteristics, propensities, and tendencies sufficient for war from time to time and place-to-place. One might say that we are not precisely hardwired for war, but it is probably safe to say that we are softwired for war! But while most societies are continually on the road to war—thanks to standing armed forces, conscription, provincial and xenophobic mass attitudes, educational mobilization for conformity, and a widely shared belief in the duty to kill/die for the country— war is itself a relatively rare event. That is, interstate or intrastate war is occurring some place in the world just about every month of every year for the past few centuries, increasingly well-reported and thus giving the impression that we are constantly out there killing one another. But if we consider the number of societies that could be embroiled in civil war every month but are not, or more dramatically, the number of pairs of states that could be at war against one another, we must conclude that war remains a relatively rare event. On the other hand, given the cost of preparation for war, the far greater costs of fighting war, and this epoch’s capacity for truly genocidal war and global holocaust, it may not be rare enough. Can this abysmal state of affairs be chalked up to the fact that most of us are genetically endowed with the capacity to make war and enough of us are otherwise endowed with the capacity to exploit the capacity for war? My response has to be yes, but what are these other capacities that come together so regularly as to provide the conditions for war that are both necessary and sufficient? Quite clearly, this requires more than some simple instinct for aggression or violence. If I might be permitted a metaphoric use of the word “gene,” I would identify at least the following. First is the “selfish gene,” not quite in Dawkins’ (1976) sense of the word referring to reproductive success,


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but extending to the distribution of material goods such as land, money, carnal pleasures, comfort, and prestige. Then there is the “authoritarian gene” reflecting a strong human propensity for hierarchy and knowing one’s place in the pecking order (Somit and Peterson, 1997), as well as a strong aversion to egalitarian, not to mention anarchic, social arrangements. Next is the already-noted “xenophobic gene” reflecting the ease with which we begin to identify with one or another affiliation group, accept its collective memory and folklore, internalize its reconstructed history of victories and defeats, prides and humiliations, classify its friends and enemies, and engage in the sub-speciation that will sooner or later permit us to deceive, revile, rob, rape, and kill those inferior infidels and savages. Worth listing in our pantheon is what we might call the “conformitycontagion gene,” perhaps one of the most fatal of human predispositions. It is one that tells most of the human race that to get along, you go along, take your cues from the topdogs, make no waves, be a good team player, and go with the flow. When it comes to national security policy, this is the geneticcultural tendency to anticipate what options are most likely to be preferred by the more powerful, or advocated by the more marginal, and then fall into line behind the policy option that provides the best chance of looking like the fellow who is practical and realistic, yet sufficiently original and independent not to appear excessively conforming. Closely related is the tendency to accept and easily defer to people of perceived authority. We see a range from the rather mild consequences found in the Sherif (1936) and Asch (1956) experiments on perceptions of visual objects to the rather dramatic and alarming study in which Milgram (1963) induced scores of subjects to administer what they thought to be painful electric shocks to their fellows. Finally, there is another lethal predisposition, the genetic-cultural tendency to be mentally lazy. The “lazy gene” prefers policy options that don’t require too much complicated reasoning, demanding homework, or serious considerations of second- and third-order consequences. Since most of our fellows “know” that complex analyses are the refuge of the procrastinator or the indecisive or the dubious patriot, this is no time for vacillation! The nation’s security is at stake, no price too high, and the race is to the quick and the brave! I like very much the observation of Nuland (2000) in his recent book on medical myths, “Mankind naturally inclines in the opposite direction from critical thought; supernature and superstition supersede reason— reason is a hard-earned product of advanced civilization, requiring, like freedom, eternal vigilance.” We know, of course, that none of these human propensities is attributable to a specific gene. But they are all so ubiquitous that they must have

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a genetic component, cultivated and reinforced by the norms and practices in most of the world’s cultures. As a matter of fact, they are probably accounted for by the fact that normal human psychology is a function of the interaction of several genetically induced propensities—with their associated strengths and weaknesses—that evolved across the eons and were found sufficiently adaptive by the topdogs to become ingredients in what Sumner (1959) called “the cake of custom.” Another way to look at human behavior at the individual level is to understand the newborn infant as the product of the genetic momentum inherited from the parents and grandparents interacting with a range of intrauterine experiences. The infant enters the world, then, with an awesome array of predispositions, and these will be of two sorts: one will shape original behavior patterns and distributions in a mix of the deterministic and the stochastic, and the other will shape the way in which the infant will respond to many experiences and stimuli that will themselves range from the most regular and predictable to the most random. As this child develops, certain of its innate predispositions—calm–nervous, cheery–grim, optimistic– pessimistic, extroverted–introverted, articulate–silent, and so on—will be reinforced by these early experiences while others will be inhibited or suppressed, thus strengthening certain behavioral predispositions while weakening others. These evolving predispositions will, in turn, again influence the events and conditions it experiences along with the ways in which the child will respond to them. In a nutshell, the development of a human adult results from the ongoing iterative interaction between predispositions and experiences, typically in a fairly consistent cultural context, well into adolescence and beyond. A half-century ago, the literature would have us believe that one’s social and political makeup were relatively firm and stable by the end of adolescence, but subsequent research seems to strengthen the notion that most of us continue to develop or decline—in the cognitive and emotional sense—well into middle age. Thus, we are today not terribly surprised when we hear a mature adult speak of “having an epiphany.” To be quite serious, I aver that these imaginary “genes” might turn out to emerge less from the biological inheritance of ancient predisposition than from the unfortunate practices of the priests and politicians who thrive, prosper, and dominate around the world as they both perpetuate and exploit our preference for superstition. For every citizen who is generous rather than selfish, loving rather than agonistic, cosmopolitan rather than provincial, egalitarian rather than authoritarian, independent rather than conforming, curious rather than lazy, we find hundreds or thousands whom we could call emotionally and intellectually challenged.


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Some Policy Implications Let me turn, then, to the policy implications that flow from these conclusions, and do so in the context of several international security policies: (1) combating terrorism; (2) reducing civil war; and (3) achieving some reductions in the design, testing, producing, and deploying weapons of war. Combatting Terrorism Beginning with perhaps the most salient policy issue on the agenda these days, it is worth noting that while salience is high in most parts of the world and social strata and sectors, the problem is far from uniform in the ways that it is apprehended (Carr, 2002). In the industrialized Western societies, there is a general sense of their newly recognized physical and social vulnerability, coupled with surprise and resentment: “what have we done to them, why do they hate us, etc?” This syndrome can be attributed to these products of genetic and cultural evolution, beginning with the more primitive xenophobia that sharpens the we–they dichotomy, which typically carries with it a lack of interest—not to mention empathy—a moral indifference, a dangerous mix of fear and contempt, moral self-righteousness. Along with these liabilities are mental laziness and consequent ignorance of the history and the current state of affairs, usually reinforced by the preference for hierarchy leading to a widespread willingness to let those allegedly knowledgeable folks in and out of government to describe, evaluate—and prescribe. Little wonder that in the West, particularly in the United States, we find strong support for “the war on terrorism,” an assumption that the enemy are Moslem, and a touching faith in the military solution. A look at the world of economically and politically underdeveloped societies should indicate why this is a war that cannot be won in any conventional sense of the word. All too many of their underclass live in a world even more inadequate than that of their Western counterparts: often illiterate, deeply religious and superstitious, deferential to traditions, beliefs, and customs, and to those who act under that authority. Their leaders, many of whom are not poor, illiterate, and ignorant often identify with the sad, often bitter, humiliating, disempowered lot of their brothers and sisters, not necessarily believers in the same religious precepts or sharing the same ethnolinguistic profile. But their priests, warlords, and patriarchs typically do more than identify with the miserable and the dispossessed. They also exploit, intimidate, agitate, misinform, and mobilize these wretched victims of the ruthless imperialists as well as their next of kin, often less empathetic than opportunistic and perhaps no less exploitive then their absentee tormentors.

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Furthermore, as Masters (2002) reminds us, it is not insane for those facing a grim immediate future to sacrifice themselves for a later generation under the influence of kin-selected altruism. As these two general syndromes, both the consequences of generations, centuries, and eons of genetic and cultural evolution—much of it all too dysfunctional—come together in confrontation, sustained violent conflict need not surprise us as the long-resigned become mobilized and empowered and turn to force, as do the smug, indifferent, and the complacent. The results are far from pretty, nor will they pass quickly.

Reducing Civil War By no means distinct from the policy problems of terrorism is that of civil or intrastate war. Whereas the former problem has received very little scientific analysis but has been the object of endless horseback explanations, subjected to a cascade of culture-bound, ideologically understood diagnosis and prescription from the extremes, the civil war question has recently seen a respectable series of rigorous investigations. Although civil war has been a frequent threat to the international system since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, we have tended to downplay its implications while focusing on the more dramatic—and often more destructive—interstate wars, especially the two World Wars. One indication is that while the Correlates of War Project published its widely used data set on the frequency, magnitude, and severity of interstate, imperial, and colonial war in 1972 (Singer and Small), it was not until a decade later (Small and Singer, 1982) that the intrastate data set was generated and yet more than another decade until the first analyses began to appear. One might say that until the half-century threat of nuclear holocaust seemed to recede that politicians, journalists, and social scientists began to take note of this long-standing threat to domestic tranquility. We can suggest the link to terrorism because both problems stem from the struggle between the topdogs and the underdogs, mostly in the ex-colonial areas in recent decades. There is always some grievance, partly material and partly symbolic, in which the topdogs enjoy access to resources, roads or waterways, commerce, labor, and of course, power. These people are not the demographic majority, putting the minorities at risk as suggested by Gurr (1970, 1993); more often they are a minority, placing the majority in a position of vulnerability, exploitation, and subjugation, and they come to power on the basis of ethnicity or social class. They do so often due to subservience to or collaboration with the earlier colonial power, becoming the anointed comprador class, and inheriting the institutions, the wealth, and


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the weapons. Ironically, they and their parents often played an active role in achieving political independence, but they then work out a form of collaboration with the former rulers or, as we saw during the Cold War period, one or another of the major powers seeking either to establish a sphere of influence or to deny it to the rival. Of course, such dominance and exploitation could not occur were it not that most of us believe in the virtues of stratification, and many of those at the bottom have come to believe that their underdog status is just and natural. From what they see and experience in infancy, childhood, and adolescence, legitimized by their parents, community elders, and patriarchs, this genetic predisposition gets awesome reinforcement for generations, making most of them willing victims. But given the heterogeneity of the human race, there will always be some who seek to break with tradition, even though such potential rebels have been ignored, rejected, ostracized, driven out, and murdered by their compatriots. However, in different times and places, the rebel finds his voice, thanks to social change, technological innovation, economic rearrangements, and the like. In today’s world of globalization, the rebels are finding powerful reinforcement; even in the most remote hamlet, via television, radio, VCR, and tape recorder, the word is out. That the word is often incorrect, dishonest, manipulated, and distorted may not be crucial; the underdogs suspect, know, or truly believe that they are victims, and all around them are neighbors eager to explain, agitate, and get them mobilized (Fanon, 1968). Such mobilization, be it on behalf of revolt and regime change, partition, or secession, typically leads to the taking up of arms, the seizure of towns and resources, and territorial claims. But it also leads to great human misery, brutal deaths, hunger, disease, streams of refugees, and devastation of the environment. Eventually, all civil wars end, even though it hardly seems so to those in the vicinity. Our biocultural evolution may help explain why it is often so difficult to end the killing that accompanies intrastate war. First, the combatants are likely to have been recruited via diverse motivations, more complex than signing up for interstate war, for example, patriotism, conscription, and sometimes remuneration, and education. But in civil war, things are more complex. There will be certain group loyalties to clan, religions and linguistic identity, familiarity with and hostility toward the enemy troops, coercion often based on threats to one’s family, friendship from youth, shared deprivations, desire for revenge, and opportunities for economic gain. Then there is the likelihood that the rebel forces will come largely from the underdog classes, be less well-educated, especially in the case of the Third World regions, with less adequate coordination, and more brutal memories.

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All of these conditions should make it much more complex and difficult to negotiate an armistice, no less a peace settlement (Licklider, 1993). Arms Control and Disarmament Perhaps the most critical and least attended to problem in today’s global system is that of international arms control and arms elimination. And one reason for the relative lack of attention is that the problem has so often been found intractable, thanks to the ways in which human nature intrudes into our efforts. A useful point of departure is that there are two opposing and somewhat plausible policy perspectives, of which the more generally accepted says that armament levels are essentially a function of political tensions and a shared sense of insecurity. These tensions result from a distrust of the potential opponents’ motives; we arm out of fear, and if that fear could be removed we could readily disarm. This certainly was the prevailing argument after the First World War, and again in the Cold War after 1945, and even today claim many adherents. Opposed to this simplistic line of reasoning is the reminder that states produce, purchase, deploy, test, and brandish weapons of war for an awesome array of reasons, well beyond the dictates of national security. The armed forces obviously must be armed, and against a pretty menacing array of contingencies; and for purposes of domestic amity the several branches of the military need to be funded in a politically equitable way. Then there are the firms that design and produce the hardware along with the politicians in whose districts the production—and jobs—occur. Further, the media find it useful to dramatize national security that, in turn, attracts an audience, which, in turn, attracts advertisers who in the next iteration can be expected to lobby for weapons procurement. Not to be forgotten in most societies are those of us who think, teach, write, and rationalize military preparedness. In America, decades ago, President Eisenhower warned about the military– industrial complex, with little effect on the evolution of the “iron triangle,” maximizing the symbiosis among the military, the legislators, and the producers. All of this fuels, and is fueled by, the nation’s military culture encompassing the schools and universities, the youth and veteran organizations, the entertainment and toy industries, and so on (Regan, 1994). And in most societies, rich or poor, the politicians and the political parties vie with one another to demonstrate their superior commitment to patriotism and preparedness. Those attributes of most of the citizens that stand in the way of prudent levels of preparedness are monumental: sense of national identity, distrust


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and suspicion, if not hostility toward foreigners and their rulers, vicarious pleasure and glory in imagining combat, tedium and boredom in most jobs, status pride and esprit for most of those in uniform, educational advancement, the greed of the corporations, their stockholders, and their employees, and of course, for the politicians and the generals, the influence and adulation that comes with their successful careers. When we recognize the complexity of weapons technology, the absence of effective monitoring and inspection, and the utter inadequacy of any institutions of international security, all of these human propensities then combine with what may well be the most fatal of our feelings: the inability to think through the implications and likely consequences of the policies that we accept or endorse. Conclusion This brief scan of the international security problematique is hardly reassuring. In addition to the misery, poverty, and brutality that nearly a third of the human race experiences on a regular basis, the near future looks bleak indeed. First, all the indications are that we will continue to suffer six or so civil or international wars per decade, as we have for nearly two centuries. Second, the world’s most militarily powerful state is publicly preparing to attack a smaller state whose regime (like that of many others, especially in its neighborhood) is loathsome, resists international oversight, and may be on the verge of acquiring a small arsenal of mass destruction weapons. Such an act of aggression, experienced during the 1930s and of course routinely seen during the period of colonialism, when the major powers used force with impunity when seeking a change of regime in their sphere of influence or facing one or another threat to its dominance. This same power is simultaneously walking away from, and trying to reverse, the modest efforts of recent decades to strengthen international legal, economic, and political institutions. Further, even as it seeks to inhibit the horizontal/geographic proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, it maintains—along with Russia—a menacing inventory of nearly 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads, many on alert, while developing an additional array of smaller nuclear weapons for such purposes as deep ground penetration. Smaller inventories are still deployed by China, France, Britain, and Israel, joined in recent years by India and Pakistan. Needless to say, in addition to these very real state-generated threats to the physical security of all of us in the international system there remain the increasingly destructive threats from a rogue’s gallery of nonstate actors known today as terrorists.

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It would be easy to join the chorus of fatalists, ideological conservatives, and other dim view takers and thus lay such an array of past and future brutalities at the doorstep of human nature. But as this analysis makes quite clear, this would be a serious error, scientifically and ethically. Our genetically inherited capacities to kill and be killed could be readily matched, deflected, and overcome by our genetically inherited capacities to love, nurture, and cooperate, were it not for the culturally inherited tendencies generated by the thousands of years of social tradition. The fault, dear colleagues, lies not in our genes alone, but in our bad habits—and with a sustained effort we might learn to kick many of those habits. That may be the good news, but the bad news is that cultural evolution is nearly as resistant to change as genetic evolution. References Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs 70(9): No. 416. Beroldi, Gerald. (1994). Critique of The Seville Statement on Violence. American Psychologist 49: 847–848. Carr, Caleb. (2002). Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians: Why it Has Always Failed and Why It Will Fail Again. New York: Random House. Dawkins, Richard. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Denenberg, V. H., L. J. Grota, and M. X. Zarrow. (1963). Maternal behavior in the rat: Analysis of cross-fostering. Journal of Reproduction Fertility 5: 133–141. Dobzhansky, Theodosius. (1962). Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species. New Heaven: Yale University Press. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1979). The Biology of Peace and War. New York: Viking Press. Erickson, Erik. (1968). Identity, Youth, Crisis. New York: Norton. Fanon, Frantz. (1968). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Festinger, Leon. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson. Fromm, Eric. (1964). The Heart of Man. New York: Harper and Row. Goldstein, Joshua. (2001). War and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Groebel, Jo and Robert A. Hinde. (1989). Aggression and War: Their Biological and Social Bases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, Ted Robert. (1993). Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflict. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press. Gurr, Ted Robert. (1970). Why Men Rebel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lemke, Douglas. (2002). Regions of War and Peace. New York: Cambridge University Press. Licklider, Roy E. (Ed.). (1993). Stopping the Killing: How Civil Wars End. New York: New York University Press.


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Lorenz, Konrad. (1966). On Aggression. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Masters, Roger D. (2002). Explaining and responding to terrorism: Inclusive fitness theory and suicide bombers. Presented at Association for Politics and the Life Sciences, Montreal, Quebec. Mead, Margaret. (1940). Warfare is only an invention—not a biological necessity. Asia August: 269–274. Milgram, Stanley. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67: 371–378. Montagu, Ashley. (1978). Touching, 2nd edition. New York: Harper & Row. Nuland, Sherwin. (2000). The Wisdom of the Body. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Regan, Patrick M. (1994). Organizing Societies for War: The Process and Consequences of Social Militarization. Westport, CT: Praeger. Seville Statement. (1986). Seville Statement on Violence, Spain, 1986. (Subsequently Adopted by UNESCO at the 25th Session of the General Conference on November 16, 1989) [http://www.unesco.org/human_rights/hrfv.htm]. Scott, J. P. and B. E. Ginsburg. (1994). The Seville Statement on Violence revisited. American Psychologist 49: 849–850. Sherif, M. (1936). The Psychology of Social Norms. New York: Harper. Silverberg, James and J. Patrick Gray (Eds.). (1992). Aggression and Peacefulness in Humans and other Primates. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singer, J. David and Melvin Small. (1972). The Wages of War, 1816–1965: A Statistical Handbook. New York: John Wiley. Small, Melvin and J. David Singer. (1982). Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Somit, Albert and Steven A. Peterson. (1997). Darwinism, Dominance and Democracy: The Biological Basis of Authoritarianism. Westport: Praeger. Sumner, William G. (1959). Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals. New York: Dover. van der Dennen J.M.G. (1990). The Origin of War. Groningen, Netherlands: Origin Press. Wrangham, Richard and Dale Peterson. (1996). Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. London: Houghton Mifflin.


Index

Adams, John 16 Adaptation 14, 157 Afghanistan 227, 238 Alcock, John 177, 208 Alexander, Richard 190, 230 Androgens 102, 104, 107, 114 Anti-androgens 110, 111 Anti-convulsants 111 Ardrey, Robert 24 Aristotle 6, 55 Arries, Phillippe 82 Automobile industry 148–150 Bacon, Francis 43 Baer, Darius 230 Barash, David 6, 7, 15, 228 Bernard, Claude 42 Biotechnology 205–224 Bosnia 226, 237 Boulding, Kenneth 210 Brain processes 45, 55–76, 98–114 Broca, Paul 56 Burke, Edmund 7, 12 Buss, David 39, 77, 129, 187, 191 Caldwell, Lynton K. 41, 50, 208, 210, 217, 218 Carson, Rachel 209 Cerebral cortex 45, 57–58, 61, 105, 106, 107, 112, 164, 166 Chance, Michael 174, 175 Changeux, Jean-Pierre 56, 60, 61, 63 Chechnya 226

Churchland, Paul 60, 61 Clinton, William 128, 206, 226, 227, 237 Cohen, Ronald 187 Condorcet, Marquis de 7 Consciousness 59–62 Coolidge, Calvin 128 “Correlates of War” 244, 256 “Cornucopia” 212–213 Cory, Gerald 162, 177 Cosmides, L. 121, 127 Crick, Francis 60 Criminal justice policy 97–120 CSN Model 165, 167, 175 Curran, Margaret 126 Darley, John 186–187 Darwin, Charles 13, 16, 19, 99, 121, 123, 124, 126, 135, 191, 245 Darwinian medicine 207 Dawkins, Richard 14, 15, 16, 252 Dayton Accord 237 Dennen, Johan van der 228, 245 Dennett, Daniel 60 Denzau, Arthur 140, 147, 154 Descartes, Rene 53, 55, 56 Determinism 70–71, 109 Diamond, Jared 70–71, 109 Dobzhansky, Theodosius 14, 244 Dominance hierarchy 15, 127, 175, 230, 253, 257 Dopamine 66, 67, 68 Double, Richard 71

264

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Index

Drug addiction 64–74 Dynamic balance range 168–169, 171, 173 DuPont, Robert 64–65 Ecological perspective 208–210, 217 Egoistic behavior 168, 169–170 Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Iranaus 233, 246 Einsten, Albert 244 Eisenhower, Dwight 258 Ekman, Paul 128 Ellis, Lee 97, 98, 100 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 52 Empathetic range 168, 170–171, 174 Endorphins 66 Environment 41–54, 146, 157 Equity theory 185 Erikson, Eric 233, 251 Ethnic conflict 225–242 Ethnocentrism 225, 227, 232–236 Euthanasia 78–96 Evolution, institutional 139–160 Evolutionary model (EM) 4–13, 225, 236 Evolutionary neuroandrogenic theory 98–114 Evolutionary psychology 121, 122–124, 128, 176 Evolutionary variance 34–35, 38 “Explore or exploit” 147–148, 150 Falger, Vincent 95, 230 Fisher, Ronald 14 Fitness 14, 208, 227, 230, 232 Fox, Robin 24, 25 Free rider problem 144 Free will 69–73, 109 Freud, Sigmund 174, 175, 244 Fromm, Erich 244, 245 Fuller, John 228 Gardner, Russell 175, 177 Gedogen 78, 93 Genentech 205

Genovese, Kitty 185–186 Good Samaritan 181, 194, 197–198, 199 Gould, Stephen Jay 14, 17 “Great Man” theory of change 145 Green Revolution 190–191 Gurr, Ted Robert 256 Haldane, J. B. S. 14 Hamilton, William 16, 173, 176, 188–189 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 6, 17 Heuristics, decision-making 130–136 Hippocratic oath 82 Hobbes, Thomas 3 Huntington, Ellsworth 50 Inclusive fitness 6, 14–15, 188–189, 232, 233 Institutional inertia 144 Islam 156 Kagan, Shelly 197–198 Kane, Robert 69, 71 Kant, Immanuel 70 Kennedy, John F. 128 Keynes, John Maynard 92 Kin selection 173, 188–189 Kohlberg, Lawrence 176 Kosovo 225–226, 227, 228 Kuran, Timur 144 Kyoto Protocol 211 Lam, Hans 79–81 Latane, Bibb 186–187 “Lazy gene” 253 Leakey, Louis 245 Limbic system 106, 164, 166 “Limits to Growth” 46 Lipkin, Robert 198 Locke, John 3 Lombroso, Cesare 99 Lorenz, Konrad 244, 245, 246

Index Maarek, P. J. 125 Macedonia 226 Machiavelli, Niccolo 3, 13, 126, 127, 128, 133 MacLean, Paul 162–165, 175 Marx, Karl 6 Masters, Roger D. 58, 63, 128, 188, 220, 256 Mayr, Ernst 14 McEachron, Donald 230 McNeil, J. R. 209 McNeill, W. H. 229 Mead, Margaret, 244 Memory 58–59 Mendel, Gregor 14 Military-industrial complex 258 MITI 153–154 Modular brain theory 56–58, 122, 175 Morita, Akio 153 Multiethnic societies 234–235 Natural selection 14, 77, 78, 99, 127, 131, 140, 155, 188–189 Nesse, Randolph 207 Netherlands Law on Euthanasia 83–86 Nisbet, Robert 42, 47 North, Douglass 141, 147 Odum, E. P. 209 Optimal foraging theory

140, 157

Pavlov, Ivan 190 Payne, J. W. 130, 131 Peterson, Steven 15, 140, 220, 253 Piaget, Jean 176 Plasser, F. 125 Plato 3, 6, 55 Political marketing 124–125 Popkin, Samuel 125 Pretty, Diana 90 Prince, John 175 Prisoner’s dilemma 189–190

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265

Prostitution 29–39 Protoreptilian brain 163–164, 167, 175 Putnam, Robert 236 Rational choice theory 10, 17 Reciprocal altruism 173–174 Reciprocity 172, 187 Recombinant DNA 205 Restak, Richard 61, 62, 72–73 Rescue 181–201 Risk aversion 145 Ritalin 109–110 Roe v. Wade 22, 23 Rosseau, Jean Jacques 3 Ruse, Michael 9, 16 Rwanda 226, 234, 235 Ryan, Nolan 188 Saad, Gad 121, 123, 133 Sacks, Oliver 127–128 Schlesinger, James 24 Schubert, James N. 126 Schur, D. 125 Semi-conductor industry 150–151 Serotonin 106, 111 Seville Statement 243, 246 Sexual selection 99–100, 101, 191–192 Simon, Herbert 133 Skinner, B. F. 59, 123 Social Darwinism 7, 161 Sociobiology 14, 219 Somit, Albert 15, 140, 220, 253 Sowell, Thomas 17 Standard Model of Today’s Experience (SMOTE) 20, 23 Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) 3–13, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24–25, 41, 42, 50, 55, 56, 62, 71, 122–124, 161, 177, 185, 187, 208, 209, 238 Stockholm meeting 43, 44 Sustainable development 211

266

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Index

Term limits 154–155 Testosterone 78, 98, 102–105, 249 Tiger, Lionel 22, 24, 25, 208 Tocqueville, Alexis de 52 Tooby, J. 121, 127 Triune brain 162–165 Trivers, Robert 190

Williams, George 14, 77, 177, 207 Wilson, Edward O. 5, 14, 15, 60, 121, 233–234 Wilson, Woodrow 16 Wright, Sewall 14 Xenophobia

225, 227–232, 252

Uncertainty 146, 184–185 Walter, Henrik 72 Watt, James 47

Yugoslavia

235

Zak, Paul

140, 142, 144

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