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By Root 707 0

of individuals and their traits, natural selection also operated on lineages of groups of people. When these groups competed with megafauna and with one another for territory or prey, the winning groups would have to be the ones whose members worked together, who cooperated with one another to fight off predators, kill prey, and eventually kill off other groups of people. In the long run of competition between groups, those groups composed of people nice to one another, even when unrelated, would have been selected for. Eventually, the only groups left would be those composed of people nice to each other. Thus, according to Darwin, core morality triumphs as fitness enhancing for groups, despite its immediate fitness costs for the individual members of groups.

The trouble with this theory is the arms race. Once a fit enough strategy is in place, Mother Nature will start searching through design space to find new strategies that take advantage of the original one. In this case, the groups composed of nice individuals are always vulnerable to variation in the behavior of new members. A mutation can arise at any time among the offspring of nice people that makes one or more of them start to exploit the niceness of everyone else, to feather their own nests without being nice in return. Through their exploitation of the nice people around them, they will secure disproportionate resources. This improves their survival odds and increases the number of their offspring. After enough generations of such within-group competition, the original group of nice people has become a group of not very nice people. Worse than nihilists, natural selection has produced Thatcherite Republicans. And what is worse, they would subsequently face the original design problem of living too long and having too many demanding kids to survive in small family groups.

If it wasn’t group selection, how did blind variation and environmental filtration hit on niceness, on norm following, as a solution to the design problem the ancestors of Homo sapiens faced? Mother Nature had one thing to work with that we did share with other primates: big brains and the “social intelligence” that goes with them. Like a few other species, our ancestors had already managed to acquire a fair ability to predict and so to exploit and to protect themselves from the tactics of other animals—predators, prey, other primates. Ethologists who study these species credit this ability to a “theory of mind.” We’ll adopt their label for it. It’s an ability hominins and apes share with whales, dolphins, and elephants—other big-brained creatures.

If our distant ancestors were like present-day chimpanzees, then they engaged in precious little cooperation. Even in the best of circumstances, chimps don’t share easily. Food transfer from parent to child is pretty much tolerated theft. Chimps almost never spontaneously help one another and never share information, something even dogs do with their masters. By comparison, contemporary human babies do all these things, and with strangers, well before they can do much more than crawl. They help, they share food, they even convey information before they have language and certainly without knowing anything about norms or niceness. That means that human babies have both an ability conveniently called a theory of mind and an inclination to cooperate; both are hardwired or quickly and easily learned with little experience at a very early age. If these traits are learned early, quickly, and reliably, then they don’t have to be innate. But all the cognitive skills we need to acquire them will have to be hardwired, along with some sort of bias toward learning them. How did humans acquire so much social intelligence and so amiable a disposition to use it?

Here is a theory based on comparative behavioral biology. There is another trait that we share with a few of the species that also have a fair grip on other minds—elephants, some whales, tamarin monkeys, and dogs: cooperative child care. This is a trait absent among chimpanzees and gorillas. The fact that