The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [64]
IRRATIONAL LOVE, UNCONTROLLABLE JEALOUSY, POINTLESS VENGEFULNESS, AND OTHER HEALTHY EMOTIONS
Mother Nature is ever on the lookout for cheap solutions to design problems. In the rain forest, the design problem was figuring out how to do best, or at least how to avoid doing worst, in a lot of one-shot strategic games. Here selfishness maximized both individual gains and fitness. To this day, chimpanzees won’t cooperate to secure food that they then have to share. Real cooperation in the jungle never had a chance. Nice guys finished last. But then hominins found themselves on the savanna, with too many young mouths to feed for too long a time. There they found nothing much to eat except berries, nuts, and what they could scavenge from the megafauna’s latest meal, provided they could scare it away and keep other scavengers away.
It’s pretty obvious that on the savanna there were new strategic interaction problems in which selfishness and fitness maximization came apart. Under these changed circumstances, nature will start searching through the inevitable variations in behavior for quick and dirty solutions to the new design problem—the iterated strategic game. It will sift through strategies like “be nice only to offspring and mate,” “be nice only to close relatives,” “be nice to everyone in the tribe all the time,” or “be nice to people who were nice to you before.” It will filter many other strategies, too.
Until this point in human evolution, the be-nice-to-nonkin strategies were all being remorselessly selected against. But now, on the savanna, the payoffs in strategic interaction began to take on the values of iterated prisoner’s dilemma or repeated “cut the cake” or the ultimatum game played again and again. Under these new circumstances, Mother Nature could exploit the ability to read minds that our ancestors shared with the other primates. She could even exploit social intelligence (the theory of mind) and the tendency to share that cooperative child care made mutually adaptive. Hominins already disposed by selection to make cooperative opening moves in a PD encounter would already be acting on a rule that is “nice.” Now it only needed to be shaped by operant conditioning—the natural selection in learned behavior Skinner discovered—into one that is retaliatory and clear. A variation in our traits that did those two things would itself strongly select for niceness in others and strongly select against being mean as well.
What kind of a device could nature have hit on in the course of our evolution that could guarantee to others that we will act in accordance with norms of niceness, fairness, equity, and much of the rest of the moral core?
It would have had to be a device that overrides the temptation to cheat, cut corners, free-ride when the opportunity occurs—and temptation can’t be resisted, as we all know only too well. Psychologists long ago identified and explained a tendency that humans share with other creatures to prefer the smaller immediate payoffs that free-riding or cheating offers over the larger long-term payoffs that cooperating provides. We tend to have trouble postponing gratifications. From a Darwinian point of view, that used to be a good thing. Nature lacks foresight and can’t afford it. It can’t select traits whose payoff is very far down the road. By the time it gets down the road, we will probably be dead already. So, for a long time nature selected for immediate gratification over long-term gain. By the time hominins arrived on the scene, this preference for short-term over long-term gain had been firmly hardwired in us. But now all of a sudden, on the African savanna, it became maladaptive. Once payoffs to cooperation became high enough, Mother Nature needed to find a device to get us to resist temptation. Otherwise our posterity wouldn’t have been around to secure the benefits of our self-control.
Go back to the reports of people who play the ultimatum game