Where Anthropology Meets Psychology

At mid-century, anthropology textbooks painted a simple picture of the plight of our ancestors on the African savanna: them against the world. Lions menaced and starvation loomed. This hostile environment was considered the driving force behind human evolution. It put a premium on inventing tools and tricks for finding food and not becoming food. So large brains evolved.

During the 1960s and early '70s, three biologists--William Hamilton, George Williams and Robert Trivers--ushered in a new view of evolution that would complicate this story line. Among its messages: for a highly social species, it isn't just a jungle out there; it's a jungle in here. Society is deeply, if often inconspicuously, competitive. Evolution favored traits that helped our ancestors get more genes passed on than their neighbors got. People's brains are designed less to deal with lions than to deal with other people's brains.

Oddly, Darwinian success in a dog-eat-dog social world turns out to involve lots of mushy feelings. Swoons of romance, love of kin, devotion to friends and pity for the needy could be useful tools in the social jungle. Even conscience and the sense of justice are now said to have roots in our genes.

That's the good news. The bad news is that a subtle, often unconscious, bias toward ourselves, our kin and our friends can narrow altruism and color moral judgments. "Deception and hypocrisy are very human devices for conducting the complex daily business of social life," wrote Edward O. Wilson in Sociobiology (1975), which brought the new paradigm to the world's attention.

Wilson's book, though mainly about nonhuman animals, made enough such pronouncements to get him vilified as a "biological determinist" and a menace to society. While he was speaking at a scientific conference, a protester called him "all wet" and dumped water on him.

It didn't work. Today the new, improved version of human sociobiology--evolutionary psychology--is flourishing. Such scholars as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and Steven Pinker (author of How the Mind Works) have begun to explain human language, logic and perception in Darwinian terms.

You know a discipline has arrived when its detractors start depicting themselves as radicals assaulting the intellectual status quo. This fall John Horgan (The End of Science) will come out with a book that, according to its publisher's catalog, "boldly contradicts all standard views" of psychology, "including those of Steven Pinker and E.O. Wilson." Ah, vindication at last.