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Zusammenfassung von The Moral Animal

Name: The Moral Animal
Rating: 4.4 (170 reviews)
Author: Robert Wright

Robert Wright

Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

4.4 (170 Bewertungen)

19 Min.

Themen

Change & Evolution Culture Anthropology Life Sciences

Inhaltsübersicht

The Moral Animal
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Kernaussage 1 von 7

What’s in it for me? An evolutionary look at human history.

What is morality? We often think of it in terms of imperatives like treating others as we’d like to be treated ourselves. Principles like the so-called “golden rule” suggest that moral behavior is a free choice – a decision to be good. It’s an attractive view, but does it stand up to the evidence?

Evolutionary psychologists don’t think so. According to them, morality can only really be understood by delving into the evolutionary development of the human species. Dig deep enough, they suggest, and you’ll find that some of our most cherished ideals serve altogether more instrumental ends – above all, the Darwinian urge to ensure survival and the propagation of genes.

Such claims made evolutionary psychology a pretty controversial discipline when it first got off the ground in the early 1990s. But, as Robert Wright’s now-classic The Moral Animal shows, there’s plenty of data backing up these kinds of often-counterintuitive insights.

Whether you’re looking at hunter-gatherer communities in Peru, the behavior of primates or our own modern societies, accounts emphasizing evolutionary mechanisms offer plausible explanations for everything from sibling rivalry to jealousy and altruism.

In the following blinks, you’ll learn

why men and women experience different forms of envy;
why social status determines whether families favor girls or boys; and
what chimpanzees can teach us about dominance and leadership.

Intelligence, youth and beauty are attractive attributes because they indicate an ability to bear and care for children.

Men, as the old cliché has it, are notoriously unfussy when it comes to casual hookups. If the answer’s “yes,” they’ll partner up with pretty much anyone. Finding a long-term mate, however, is a different business.

Take it from the American sociobiologist Robert L. Trivers. In a study published in 1990, Trivers suggested that while the average male isn’t particularly choosy about sexual partners, both men and women apply exacting standards when selecting long-term partners. His evidence? The majority of participants in his study stated that potential mates had to demonstrate above-average intelligence to be taken into consideration.

That’s easy enough to explain in terms of evolutionary psychology: when men seek a long-term partner, they’re looking for attributes that suggest their mate will be a capable guardian of their future children. Intelligence is an obvious sign of just that. It’s important to note that this isn’t a conscious choice, however; according to evolutionary psychologists, the preference for a smart and competent mother is an entirely unconscious calculation designed to ensure the survival of children.

That said, intelligence isn’t the only characteristic that’s attractive to men – youth and beauty are just as important. According to a 1989 study by evolutionary psychologist David Buss that looked at men’s preferences in cultures across the globe, this isn’t mere male superficiality. Rather, typical youth and beauty markers – think big eyes and small noses – are pretty reliable indicators of female fertility.

That means these choices once again come down to the importance of passing on one’s genes: the greater the chance that a partner will bear children, the more likely it is that a male’s genetic makeup will survive and thrive over many future generations.

Jealousy is multifaceted and differs between men and women.

The view that jealousy is a negative characteristic is pretty widespread. Plenty of people simply rule out relationships with anyone who demonstrates jealous tendencies. But is a life without jealousy even possible? Well, it depends on your stance. Ask evolutionary psychologists, for example, and they’ll tell you that feeling jealous is entirely natural.

That doesn’t mean it’s experienced the same way by both sexes. In fact, males and females experience quite different forms of jealousy. That’s the conclusion of a 1982 study by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson. The two psychologists placed electrodes on the bodies of men and women to measure their physiological reactions to various ideas – specifically, their responses when asked to imagine their partners having sex or bonding emotionally with other people of the opposite sex.

Cheating on male partners is an evolutionary strategy to ensure the best outcomes for children.

If you’ve seen the 1949 movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, you’ll probably remember Marilyn Monroe singing the jazz standard “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” But is it true – are women really that mercenary? Well, according to quite a few evolutionary psychologists, yes.

That’s where cheating comes in. According to proponents of the discipline, few things motivate infidelity like the desire for material wealth. The idea that women receive gifts from their lovers suggests that the more partners they have, the more material goods they’ll receive. It’s pretty much a cliché in popular culture, but there’s also scientific data to back it up. Take a 1979 study by the American anthropologist Donald Symons that looked at bonobos. According to Symons, female bonobos regularly exchange sexual favors with male suitors in exchange for large chunks of meat.

Social status and wealth play an important role in determining which gender of child families favor.

You’ve probably read a hundred fairy tales about a rich young prince falling for the lowly scullery maid and sweeping her away to a life of wealth and happiness. It’s a pretty common theme in stories from around the world. That might just be because there’s some solid evolutionary psychology lurking behind these fantasies.

Here’s the basic insight: social status and wealth play a huge role in determining which gender a family’s favorite child will be. According to evolutionary psychologists, the choice of a favorite reflects an understanding of which child has the greatest potential to propagate his or her genes in the most advantageous way. In poor, low-status families, that’s usually a girl. Why? Well, women have a much greater chance than men of marrying “up” into wealthier families.

Altruism is self-serving, and morality is largely driven by what other people think of us.

Why do we empathize with someone starving in the streets? Well, isn’t altruism just part and parcel of what it means to be human? According to evolutionary psychologists, it’s not quite as simple as that. In fact, as they see it, altruistic behavior is primarily self-serving: we’re kind to others because it establishes a debt in our favor.

Think of it like this: if you give a person who hasn’t eaten for three days something to eat, the chances are he’ll be inclined to go out of his way to help you. That makes a lot of sense when you think about the small, tight-knit communities in which humans evolved. Doing someone a good turn in your community was likely to stand you in good stead. After all, you’d be pretty much guaranteed to see him every day and thus remind him that he owed you a favor. Of course, it doesn’t work out like that in bigger communities, but the evolutionary instinct to help others for self-serving ends still endures.

Human society might be inherently hierarchical, but hierarchy isn’t genetic.

Plenty of twentieth-century anthropologists like Franz Boas and Margaret Mead were charmed by the seemingly egalitarian communities of hunter-gatherers they encountered during their travels. They believed they’d found an alternative to the hierarchical class societies of the West. Unfortunately, further research has shown that hierarchies are inherent in virtually every human society.

Take the Ache people of Eastern Paraguay. On the face of it, their society is highly egalitarian. The meat brought back by hunters, for example, is always pooled and divided equally among village members. But when anthropologists Kim Hill and Hillard Kaplan took a closer look in 1988, they realized just how deceptive appearances can be.

Status depends on strategic alliances rather than simple brute force.

All right – we’ve seen that leaders are part and parcel of human societies, and that any number of types of people can fill that role. In this blink, we’ll take a closer look at how actors rise through the ranks to become top dogs. Let’s start by turning to our close cousins the chimpanzees to see how it’s done.

Brute force plays its part in asserting dominance in the world of chimpanzees, but violence alone isn’t enough. In fact, one of the most effective techniques used by these primates is the simulation of strength. That’s something the famous British anthropologist Jane Goodall observed in chimpanzee populations in Gombe, Tanzania, in 1986. During her fieldwork there, she noticed that one of the males – nicknamed Michael – was a lot less brawny than his peers.

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Worum geht es in The Moral Animal?

The Moral Animal (1994) delves into the fascinating – and occasionally controversial – field of evolutionary psychology to ask what really motivates human behavior. Drawing on the work of Darwin as well as a wealth of anthropological sources, Robert Wright sheds new light on a range of familiar everyday situations in the animal kingdom and our own societies.

Bestes Zitat aus The Moral Animal

In our ancestral environment, just about everyone encountered was someone we might well encounter again.

—Robert Wright

Wer The Moral Animal lesen sollte

Psychologists and keen observers of human behavior
Biologists and other natural scientists
Anyone fascinated by the evolution of our species

Über den Autor

Robert Wright is an American journalist whose work spans the fields of history, politics, psychology and religion. He is the editor of New Republic, a senior fellow at the non-partisan think tank New America and a regular contributor to magazines such as the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. Wright’s previous books include Three Scientists and Their Gods (1988) and Nonzero (1999).

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