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By Root 1601 0

back to our earliest ancestors and through a process of natural selection has become part of the fabric of our biological beings. Joyce explains that there are two schools of thought about the evolutionary benefits of values-based behavior: the benefit-to-the-group model and the benefit-to-the-individual model. In a group model, our fictional caveman ancestor—call him Ook—and his tribe-mates somehow developed a cooperative, altruistic, value-based society that allowed them to function more efficiently than their neighbors; they could farm or hunt or defend themselves better, or shelter themselves in such a way that they were able to grow their tribe. Their neighboring tribe, two hills and three caves over, had no sense of values, and thus would be more disorganized and less capable of cooperation, trust, and sharing. Eventually, starvation, exposure, or other factors eliminated the other tribe because they were unable to produce a smoothly functioning society. This “survival-of-the-fittest-group” scenario has obvious ramifications for developed societies—like corporations—but it leaves something out: How did we get to be a group of moral thinkers if we weren’t born that way?

“Benefits can accrue to the individual from acting in a moral way and thinking in moral terms,” Joyce explains. In other words, Ook, by acting in an altruistic, self-sacrificing way—sharing, cooperating, and helping others—engendered trust, which, as we know from Professor Zak’s work, would prompt his tribe-mates to reciprocate. Ook would reap the rewards from a shared harvest, a shared shelter, and the people who watched his back, and thereby would gain a reproductive advantage over other members of his group. He would make a boodle of baby Ooks, propagating his genes throughout the culture, which would mean more moral thinkers. According to Joyce, this idea of individual selection is a more likely explanation for our ability to think about behavior and cooperation in terms of values.

Biology is not the only transmitter of Ook’s values orientation, of course. Being a social leader, Ook talks to his comrades, they observe him, and he exerts influence over them. His friends, Nook and Took, see that Ook is building a pretty good life; he has lots of food, a warm cave to sleep in, and good luck with women. If they are smart enough to observe what he is doing, his fellows will imitate him. Thus, value-based thinking may not be purely a biological adaptation, because these tribes’ people are talking to each other and sharing ideas; they can influence each other’s behavior. So, Nook and Took develop a moral capacity, as do their offspring. The tribe gets bigger and more able than the tribe two hills over not because they are stronger, but because they work together better. The actual details of how early man got from morality to having more babies could have gone a variety of ways, Joyce suggests, but it seems clear that values evolved because they do provide reproductive advantage.

What strikes me as interesting in this theory is how it, too, stands the notion of survival of the fittest on its head. Ook might not have been the strongest or the fastest cave dweller on the rock, but his ability to work well with others and inspire them to do the same could have made him very popular, in a nice-caveman-gets-the-girl sort of way. The more offspring Ook produced, the greater the chance that he passed his propensity for values-based thinking along with his genes, throughout the eons. Nice guys—genetically speaking—finished first.

Now, here is a leap: Our biological propensity for values-based thinking leads directly to Adam Smith’s vision of ideal capitalist enterprise: the development of a free and fair market system based on mutual advantage.

A far-fetched statement? Think about it.

Since Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, the book that birthed the idea of capitalism and free markets, many have misapplied or misinterpreted his theories to justify various versions of business-is-war, laissez-faire capitalism. The key thought many overlook, however, is the