We Did Not Evolve to Be Selfish—and Humans Are Increasingly Aware We Can Choose How Our Cultures Can Evolve By: April M. Short

8/24/2023

We Did Not Evolve to Be Selfish—and Humans Are Increasingly Aware We Can Choose How Our Cultures Can Evolve By: April M. Short

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At this critical moment in human history, a new paper on multilevel cultural evolution shows how looking to our cultural evolutionary origins might help us improve society at many levels.

Ours is a critical time in the cultural evolution of humanity that is likely to shape our long-term future, or lack thereof. As a species, we have been on a self-destructive trajectory that has led us to our current polycrisis of unlivable economic conditions, worsening climate disasters, and the potential of an unspeakably devastating war, as the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023 puts it. The changes we all need to make, if we want subsequent generations to enjoy life, will most likely require big shifts toward improving connections with each other and the planet, and away from extraction and individualism.

The good news is that humans evolved often as cooperative and “prosocial” beings, so looking to the past and better understanding our cultural evolution as a species might help illuminate the best ways forward across the board. This is the basis of a paper published in April 2023 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled, “Multilevel Cultural Evolution: From New Theory to Practical Applications.” Rather than focusing on the genetic code and physical evolution of humans, the paper explores the advanced and groundbreaking—but seldom discussed—field of cultural evolution.

The paper’s senior author David Sloan Wilson, a distinguished professor emeritus of biological sciences at Binghamton University, New York, and the founder of the school’s Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program, told the Independent Media Institute in May 2023 that the authors of the article wrote it “to show that a synthesis, which has already taken place for the study of biological evolution, is now in progress for the study of human cultural evolution, with wide-ranging practical applications.”

Looking at humanity through a lens of cultural evolution shows that “we are neither cooperative nor selfish,” Wilson says. “We are capable of both—so becoming cooperative requires providing the right environmental conditions. Also, cultural evolution helps us to recognize the common denominators that apply across all contexts of our lives—our families, neighborhoods, schools, businesses, and so on, and at all scales, from small groups to the planet. This is very empowering.”

He shared the example of a program for at-risk high school students that he helped to design in 2010 at Regents Academy in Binghamton, New York.

“By providing the right social environment, kids who flunked three or more of their classes during the previous year [2010] performed as well as the average high school student in the district [in 2011],” he says.

Wilson explained in an article published on the Binghamton University website in April 2023 that evolutionary science is made up of a triad: variation, selection, and replication—and that triad is also visible in the evolution of culture, “from economics and business, to engineering and the arts, and the functioning of society at all levels.” He added that “knowing how cultural evolution happens also means we can harness it for the larger good, creating a more just and sustainable world.”

While evolution has been at the core of biological sciences over the last century, evolutionary science is rarely part of the conversation when it comes to understanding culture and the modern-day problems of society.

As Steven C. Hayes, co-author of the paper, psychologist, and professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno, told the Independent Media Institute in May 2023, multidimensional and multilevel evolutionary theory “is now at a level of knowledge and sophistication where it’s ready to step forward and be part of that broader cultural conversation.”

However, he says that if you pick almost any area that might be important in our society, “from immigration to climate change, or economic justice, or the opiate crisis, or the impacts of the pandemic, or suicide in young people—and on and on it goes—” seldom will behavioral sciences and the behavioral aspects of the evolutionary sciences even be mentioned. The authors of the paper on multicultural cultural evolution sought to remedy this.

Hayes says that while he acknowledges the real atrocities humans have committed (like slavery, climate destruction, and much else), it’s imperative that people are able to see that humans have also done better, and are capable of doing better, going forward.

“It strikes me in doing this work that the narratives we tell ourselves about our history as a species are powerful in shaping the future,” he says. “We’ve created an economic system that is destroying the Earth. Think seriously about what we’ve supported just over the last 50 to 100 years, and how hard it is for us to step up to the challenges of just climate change, never mind economic disparities—we can do better.”

Hayes says as a species it is time for us to choose to “evolve on purpose,” and he believes “we can use the tools of evolutionary science to do that.”

Humans Evolved as Prosocial—Not Individualistic

One key point the paper makes is that humans evolved most often through cooperation and we are, at our foundations, prosocial—meaning that we’ve evolved to care about the welfare of others and behave in ways that support the greater good.

The paper explores in detail three hallmarks of cultural evolution that include: 1) prosociality, 2) social control that enforces prosocial behavior, and 3) symbolic thought, which includes an adaptable catalog of symbols with shared meaning.

Hayes, who is also president of the Institute for Better Health, has worked for four decades on developing a new behavioral science approach called Contextual Behavioral Science and studying how to ease human suffering by empowering them to live values-based lives.

“We did not evolve as selfish primates,” Hayes says. “We evolved as social primates, we reined in selfishness, we fostered community, and we made sure that every voice matters.”

He notes that from his perspective, having researched cognitive functioning and psychology there is an “alternative view of human functioning that will foster human beings who are whole and free.”

From a psychological perspective, which evolutionary science supports and the paper details, individualism is simply not good for us.

“Thriving… almost always means collaborating with others,” Hayes says, noting that one point that should give people hope is that when one moves in an individualistic way, toward selfishness and narcissism, they move toward unhappiness.

“Narcissists are not happy,” he says. “People who lie, cheat, and steal are not happy. There’s a deep-down yearning for love, connection, and belonging that is there at birth.”

Hayes sees the cultural biological evolution toward traits that benefit the common good over individual gain show up not just in human history, but in today’s world, by way of his work as a clinical psychologist. The afflictions that are most prominent today of narcissism, loneliness, and actions that harm others, and how they are intertwined with negative impacts of social media, for one example, all could be said to varying degrees to have a solution to focus more on building interpersonal relationships and communities. And individuals who partake in this positive socialization often have better mental health as a benefit.

“It’s time for us as mental health professionals and scientists to speak about the importance of relationships and of empowering our young people to learn how to have relationships that matter.”

An Alternative to the “Greed Is Good” Paradigm

The “Economics and Business” section of the paper is focused on the ways multilevel cultural evolutionary theory can provide an alternative to the “greed is good” economic narrative. It expands upon the Nobel Prize-winning work of political scientist Elinor Ostrom, which proved that groups can effectively self-manage common-pool resources like “forests, pastures, fisheries, and the groundwater,” without falling into self-serving behaviors when they follow a specific set of design principles she puts forth. Ostrom’s work disproved the well-known economic myth of the “tragedy of the commons” that insists privatization and top-down regulation are necessary to manage resources.

The paper proposes that Ostrom’s concepts have the potential to be effective across “contexts and scales” rather than being confined to the discipline of economics. And the paper predicts that by using cultural evolutionary theory, “[v]irtually all functionally oriented groups can benefit” from implementing the principles Ostrom laid out for economics.

Expanding the Conversation

Hayes says that if readers were to take one thing away from the paper, he would want it to be an understanding that modern evolutionary science is not just what you learned about in high school.
“My message to people would be: When you know how to evolve on purpose, who knows what your ceiling may be? You as an individual, you as a couple, you as a family, you as a company, you as a community, us as a world.”

While individualism and “survival of the fittest” were the takeaways from the study of evolution that were widely upheld in modern culture, Hayes notes that Charles Darwin was among the first to talk about the role of multilevel selection and cooperation in evolution.

“There are economic and social forces that took advantage of the competitive view, and it started very early on in the field [of evolution],” he says. And Hayes says that it wasn’t long after Darwin shared his theory of evolution, along with other prominent thinkers at the time, that corporations began to take hold of the narrative.

Hayes says he thinks society has been slow to adopt a more realistic understanding of human evolution because doing so would not appeal to certain economic and social interests. The paper on multilevel cultural evolution offers that alternative perspective, Hayes says.

“This paper says, modern, multidimensional, multilevel evolutionary science is ready to step forward as both a basic and applied field. It has a number of successes it can point to right now,” he says. “It is on sound ground that we can begin to think about how to evolve on purpose… in the real way that culture, companies, individuals, couples, communities, neighborhoods, and fields of study have always done: through healthy variation that’s selected, retained, and fitted to context in a multidimensional and multilevel way.”

Hayes notes that a principled alternative way of culture is “one in which we begin to see that it’s our obligation as citizens, as family members to create a context in which trust sharing and cooperation can grow,” he says. “That isn’t namby-pamby, it’s not weak, it’s not Pollyanna, it’s not anything goes. It’s the salve on the wounds that are created by selfishness, and a vision that we can live out.”

We humans do our best, he notes, when relationships, families, businesses, and groups cooperate.

“Why wouldn’t you want to scale that? Why wouldn’t you want a model for how to do that? The problem is that our models have been mostly part of [colloquial] wisdom and spiritual traditions, and they’ve been sliced and diced by the modern world,” Hayes says. “People with narrow interests have stepped forward and have sold humanity a bill of goods that is false.”

Author

April M. Short is an editor, journalist, and documentary editor and producer. She is a co-founder of the Observatory, where she is the Local Peace Economy editor, and she is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she was a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Good Times, a weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, California. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, LA Yoga, Pressenza, the Conversation, Salon, and many other publications.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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13 Comments

Charles Brown

8/28/2023 01:57:04 pm

I commend you on this article, Comrade. I have been writing the same conclusion as you have . Here are my agreements with you:

http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/is-human-nature-social-or-selfish-i.html

8/28/2023 02:04:47 pm

http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/our-mother-nature-antoinette-blackwell.html

Labor Power

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Our Mother Nature: Antoinette Blackwell

Blackwell chose to highlight balance and cooperation rather than

struggle and savage rivalry.

By Charlie Brown

Antoinette Blackwell was both an Evolutionist and a Creationist ! She

was the first woman ordained as a Christian minister in the US , and

she wrote a General Science textbook agreeing with Charles Darwin's

theory of the evolution of species by natural selection. What an

interesting historical character in light of today's debates between

Creationists and Evolutionists !

Mother Blackwell was also a suffragette. In 1920, at age 95, she was

the only participant of the 1850 Women's Rights Convention in

Worcester, Massachusetts who lived long enough to vote when at last

women had the vote, dammit.

Reverend Blackwell was also an abolitionist against slavery. She was

one of the few white feminists to support the 15th Amendment giving

the vote to Black men, even as no women had the vote. She supported

the famous African American leader, Frederick Douglass, in this debate

within American feminism in the mid-1900's.

A regular Force of Nature was she.

(Countied)

8/28/2023 02:08:16 pm

Continued: I came across Blackwell in reading about Charles Darwin's book The

Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Antoinette

Blackwell wrote The Sexes Throughout Nature. I haven't actually read

those books yet, but I have them on order. Future blogs will explore

the issues in those books more.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia's items explains how Blackwell argued that there

was natural selection for "cooperation and balance" among humans, all

of us members of the same species. Survival of the fittest does not

mean survival of competition between humans, survival of the toughest

individual "men". The fittest are those who successfully reproduce !

Reproduction requires , in the first place, cooperation (smiles).

On the primacy of cooperation in natural origins , See Labor Power's

Is Human Nature Social or Selfish ?

blog http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/is-human-nature-social-or-selfish-i.html

Antoinette Blackwell's book, The Sexes Throughout Nature, critiques

Charles Darwin four years after he published The Descent of Man, and

Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871,[1] and Herbert Spencer, whom the

author thought were the most influential men of her day.[2] Darwin had

written a letter to her in 1869, thanking her for a copy of her book,

Studies in General Science.[3] She also answers Dr. E. H. Clarke and

8/28/2023 02:20:16 pm

From: Charles Brown Date: June 30, 2021 a THIS IS ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY Survival Of The Nicest? A Theory Of Our Origins Says Cooperation-Not Competition-Is Instinctive CB: Darwin’s principle is actually survival of the _fertile_ in the first place ; the fit are more fertile . Fertility success is the Darwinian definition of fitness success Being nice , cooperative is a better way to be fertile . https://nypost.com/2019/12/31/doing-good-deeds-actually-reduces-physical-pain-study/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site+buttons&utm_campaign=site+buttons http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/is-human-nature-social-or-selfish-i.html " The decisive battle between early culture and human nature must have been waged on the field of primate sexuality…. Among subhuman primates sex had organized society; the customs of hunters and gatherers testify eloquently that now society was to organize sex…. In selective adaptation to the perils of the Stone Age, human society overcame or subordinated such primate propensities as selfishness, indiscriminate sexuality, dominance and brute competition. It substituted kinship and co-operation for conflict, placed solidarity over sex, morality over might. In its earliest days it accomplished the greatest reform in history, the overthrow of human primate nature, and thereby secured the evolutionary future of the species." — Sahlins, M. D. 1960 The origin of society. Scientific American 203(3): 76–87. http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/class_text_036.pdf v>

http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/09/survival-of-nice-and-fertile.html

8/28/2023 02:30:39 pm

As you imply, humans high level of Darwinian fitness comes from our high level of sociality , including social relations with dead generations through language and culture

Nonetheless, clearly in the Stone Age, our having culture was a highly adaptive advantage over species that did not have culture , stone tools or controlling fire made through culture or symbolic or imaginary thinking and communication, etc. ,raising our species fitness, the growth of our population . This is evidenced by _Homo sapiens_ expanding in population and therefore migrating to an expanded area of living space across the earth , out of what is now named Africa to the other continents. Stone Age foraging and kinship organized societies were the mode of life for the vast majority of time of human species ' existence, 95% or more. The first human societies had an extraordinarily high survival need to be able to rely on each other at levels of solidarity that we cannot even imagine. The intensity of the network of social connections of a band of 25 to 100 people living in ecological food chain location , in a very challenging struggle for existence and survival against predators , would almost constitute a new level of organic organization and integrity above individual bodies or selves. Ancient kinship /family/culture /symbolic communication systems from around 2.5 million years ago ( the beginning of the Truly Civilized Stone Age) were almost super-organic bodies; the human social group was a harmonious , multi-individual Body, quasi-organism. The Individual human bodies, Selves, were very frail and weak in contrast with the bodies of the field of predators they were prey for .

Because this is the Stone Age is the origin and founding of human’s unique _nature_, human species society , and that it is dependent upon highly socially harmonious individuals, I say human _nature_ is social, not _selfish_

8/28/2023 02:33:06 pm

The dominance of the food chain that humans, ultimately reached even in the Stone Age with relatively _frail_ individual bodies. could only be reached by super-social , super internally-cooperative, super-intra-species harmony . This was only possible with symbolic communication both within a living generation and across generations, It is clear to me that natural selection , in the classical Darwinian sense, elected hominin groups with policies and practices of of "love thy neighbor as thyself " and "charity" over those that might have derived principles of "selfishness and greed", if there were any in the Stone Age before Civilization.

8/28/2023 03:11:38 pm

What is FIT in the famous phrase “survival of the fittest “ ? Physically fit , in the sense of bodily fit, fit to literally fight for success in the struggle for existence ( the Darwinian term of art for longevity in an individual organism ): surviving , getting enough to eat , not getting eaten , not falling out of a tree or off a cliff , not freezing to death , not overheating to death BEFORE REPRODUCING , BEFORE BEING FERTILE, passing on one’s genes to next generations . The latter, differential fertility, is more important in determining fitness than differential mortality. Cooperation and balance between the sexes is most important is raising species fitness. _Fitness is passing on genes to the next generation_, and reproductive behavior, cooperation and balance between the sexes is critical to success in passing on genes to the next generation.

Darwin’s principle is actually survival of the _fertile_ in the first place ; the fit are more fertile . Fertility success is the Darwinian definition of fitness success. Being nice , cooperative is a better way to be fertile .

As renowned anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once wrote, “The decisive battle between early culture and human nature must have been waged on the field of primate sexuality…. Among subhuman primates sex had organized society; the customs of hunters and gatherers testify eloquently that now society was to organize sex…. In selective adaptation to the perils of the Stone Age, human society overcame or subordinated such primate propensities as selfishness, indiscriminate sexuality, dominance and brute competition. It substituted kinship and co-operation for conflict, placed solidarity over sex, morality over might. In its earliest days it accomplished the greatest reform in history, the overthrow of human primate nature, and thereby secured the evolutionary future of the species." — Sahlins, M. D. 1960 The origin of society. Scientific American 203(3): 76–87. http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/class_text_036.pdf v>

Men being nice, “cooperative and balanced”, toward women , the Blackwellian hypothesis on human evolution, was the key to humans high Darwinian fitness through our evolutionary origin and development .

8/28/2023 03:26:42 pm

Symbolic Inheritance For anthropology, culture-language-Symbolic Inheritance is the unique species characteristic of _homo sapiens_. In a sense, "culture-language-Symbolic Inheritance is another word for "wisdom", from the notion that humans are the species _homo wise_. It is humans socially learned practices, customs, language, traditions, beliefs, religion, spirituality that make us "wise" in so many ways, certainly clever and winners _as a species_ ( not just as a few "fit" Individuals) in the struggles and snuggles to survive as a species. Since the advent of civilization, sometimes it's not so clear how wise our culture makes us. Greed, slavery, war, male supremacy, Egoism originate with Civilization ! It is better termed Savagery and Barbarism. Therein lies the central drama of the history of the human species.

8/28/2023 03:48:45 pm

https://take10charles.blogspot.com/2018/04/male-supremacy-greed-and-war-are-not-in.html?m=1

day, April 30, 2018

Male supremacy, greed and war are not in our genes

The male supremacist family, private property (classes; greed), and the state ( special repressive apparatus ) arises as a complex together circa 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. They are still together in a complex that dominates the human species in 2018. Before that for the about 2.5 million years of the Stone Age ( true Civilization) there was gender equivalence, sharing and peace in the species; that's when we were substantially "hardwired " genetically . So, Male supremacy and class divided society and war are not in our genes.

8/28/2023 04:32:55 pm

And: http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/03/decisive-battle-between-early-culture.html

http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/01/only-humans-have-symbolic-communication.html

http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/12/is-human-nature-social-or-selfish.html

http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/05/culturally-inherited-adaptations-give.html

http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2020/12/differentia-specifica-of-human-species.html

http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2017/01/let-beauties-beautify-you-you-beast.html

http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2017/01/remix-of-blackwell-concrete-abstract.html

8/30/2023 08:12:34 am

“ While evolution has been at the core of biological sciences over the last century, evolutionary science is rarely part of the conversation when it comes to understanding culture and the modern-day problems of society.”

Actually, there is a major school of anthropology on the Evolution of Culture founded by Leslie A. White at the University of Michigan

8/30/2023 08:17:36 am

Wikipedia:” Multilinear theory
Edit
Cultural particularism dominated popular thought for the first half of the 20th century before American anthropologists, including Leslie A. White, Julian H. Steward, Marshall D. Sahlins, and Elman R. Service, revived the debate on cultural evolution. These theorists were the first to introduce the idea of multilinear cultural evolution.[3]

Under multilinear theory, there are no fixed stages (as in unilinear theory) towards cultural development. Instead, there are several stages of differing lengths and forms. Although, individual cultures develop differently and cultural evolution occurs differently, multilinear theory acknowledges that cultures and societies do tend to develop and move forward.[3][19]

Leslie A. White focused on the idea that different cultures had differing amounts of 'energy', White argued that with greater energy societies could possess greater levels of social differentiation. He rejected separation of modern societies from primitive societies. In contrast, Steward argued, much like Darwin's theory of evolution, that culture adapts to its surroundings. 'Evolution and Culture' by Sahlins and Service is an attempt to condense the views of White and Steward into a universal theory of multilinear evolution.[3]
”

8/30/2023 08:21:11 am

https://youtu.be/bPLD3hSTDeI?si=AMFIjCNo5iYt5Pv7