Did Murder Evolve?
Is it appropriate for scientists to speculate on the evolution of murder? Nature had no problem with it. They allowed Dan Jones, a freelance writer in Brighton, UK, to publish a lengthy article on how murder and warfare evolved. No other explanations for these scourges were mentioned except to dismiss them. Nature has apparently incorporated political science, ethics, theology and criminology as subdomains of evolutionary biology. “What can evolution say about why humans kill?” the article begins, ending not only with the evolution of murder and war, but claims that evolution has even provided humans with a moral sense to mitigate them.
Dan Jones began by setting up an opposing voice to knock down:
“It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors … that war or any other violent behaviour is genetically programmed into our human nature … [and] that humans have a ‘violent brain’.”
These are the ringing words of the ‘Seville Statement on Violence’, fashioned by 20 leading natural and social scientists in 1986 as part of the United Nations International Year of Peace, and later adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It was written to counter the pessimistic view that violence and war are inevitable features of human life.
The decades since have not been kind to these cherished beliefs. A growing number of psychologists, neuroscientists and anthropologists have accumulated evidence that understanding many aspects of antisocial behaviour, including violence and murder, requires the study of brains, genes and evolution, as well as the societies those factors have wrought.
Jones’s opening shows that 21 years ago, scientists – even those who accepted evolution from animal ancestors – considered it inappropriate to discuss the evolution of war. By arguing against “these cherished beliefs” that were written to counter a pessimistic view, is Jones now promoting pessimism?
Not necessarily. He came up with a quasi-optimistic update to the old Darwinian idea that violence is programmed into humans from their evolutionary past. It reads like a kind of bad-news, good-news joke: yes, we are programmed for violence, but we are not as bad as chimpanzees. The implication is that since humans emerged from the apes, evolution appears to have modified its trajectory. Now, humans have evolved to cooperate. In this view, the proverbial angels and devils that sit on our shoulders have also evolved.
At the same time, though, historians, archaeologists and criminologists have started to argue that in most places life was more violent – and more likely to end in murder – in the past than it is today. The time span of this apparent decline in violence has been too short for appeals to natural selection to be convincing. If humans have evolved to kill, then it seems that they have also evolved to live without killing, given the right circumstances.
Jones described how Martin Daly and Margo Wilson of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, published a book Homicide with this thesis just two years after the Seville Statement. It was the rise of “evolutionary psychology.” They contradicted the Seville Statement by arguing that humans are programmed with violent proclivities, but then let Darwinism off the hook somewhat by claiming that “killing was, by and large, not something that evolution had selected for.” What evolution was selecting for was higher status and reproductive success. Killing and death were just by-products of these goals.
Jones presented this as today’s majority view among evolutionary psychologists before delving into alternative views – all based on evolution. Some feel natural selection did select for murder, because in some contexts the benefits outweigh the costs: “Homicide can be such a beneficial solution to adaptive problems in certain, specific contexts that it would be surprising if selection had not fashioned mechanisms to produce lethal aggression,” said David Buss [U of Texas] and Joshua Duntley [Richard Stockton College], authors of a controversial “homicide adaptation theory.”
The body of Jones’s article explored various attempts to explain, within evolutionary thinking, why men are more prone to commit murder than women, or how the prefrontal cortex might be organized to promote or preclude violent outbursts. Adrian Raine and Lori LaCasse of USC, for instance, proposed that “Put crudely, murderers don’t have the prefrontal resources to regulate that unbridled emotional output.” Does this make murder an artifact of neural arrangements? Jones elaborated, “Just as evolution has shaped men’s bodies to be, on average, larger than women’s, it has also distributed the resources needed to regulate emotion and aggression unevenly between the sexes.”
The discussion proceeded to an even more bizarre concept: the evolution of morality. Evolution has apparently produced neurons that get bent out of shape when moral codes are violated:
In an intriguing turn, Raine and his USC colleague Yaling Yang have recently pointed to a link between homicidal behaviour and the capacity to follow moral guidelines. Over the past six years, brain-imaging studies aimed at understanding moral judgements have illustrated the crucial role of the emotional feeling that comes with violating moral codes. Parts of the prefrontal cortex and amygdala that are abnormal in violent individuals and murderers are activated when making moral judgements. Raine and Yang have proposed that these systems serve as the engine that translates moral feelings into behavioural inhibition – an engine that has blown a gasket in the antisocial, violent and murderous.
Jones did not define morality, but clearly the moral codes he described are not really moral codes (in the sense of universal standards of right and wrong); they could only be societal norms that passed the natural selection filter, at least for the time being. Normally, moral codes, whatever they are, produce inhibitions in individuals, he said. This is a strictly behavioral definition devoid of meaning. Clearly, rationality or human nature in the classical sense could not be involved. An engine that can blow a gasket is merely a machine.
At this point Jones made a shocking statement: in evolutionary terms, war is a good thing:
Men are not just more likely to kill other people than women are, they are also more likely to do so in groups – and for some researchers it is in these realms that killing offers real evolutionary value. The murder of one person by another may be almost accidental, an unlooked for by-product of aggression. The murder of members of one group by those of another could be an adaptive behaviour that evolution has encouraged.
For support, Jones described chimpanzee studies that show the apes engaging in ruthless warfare and carnage. He then compared the monkey antics with human violence, but backpedaled slightly to avoid describing a straight-line connection: “Moving from studies of chimpanzee coalitional violence and comparisons with small-scale tribal conflicts to understanding modern warfare is, however, far from straightforward.” Chimpanzees fight more within groups than between them, he claimed. One researcher cited said that chimps display 200 times more violent behavior than humans. Another was quoted explaining how humans learned that in-group cooperation was a good strategy. Either way, it’s still all just evolution: “altruism and war co-evolve, promoting conflict between groups and greater harmony within them.” For reasons he did not defend, he merely suggested that evolution selects soldiers over hoodlums:
In cultures and societies with a recent history of warfare, children tend to be socialized to tolerate pain and to react aggressively, which prepares them for the possibility of becoming a soldier (arguably something that evolution would favour) or a potentially deadly brawler (probably something it wouldn’t).
But could a blind process tell the difference? He did not argue his probabilities.
Jones mitigated his pessimistic evolutionary determinism with assertions of the existence of free will:
None of this means that a tendency to kill is set in stone; if anything, it shows that humans have evolved to be much less of a risk to each other within groups than they would be if they were as bellicose as chimps. And there is evidence that this risk is reducing further in studies of death rates from both inter-group homicide and intra-group warfare, both of which seem to have plummeted over the millennia.
Has Jones not counted up the death tolls from the World Wars? As if to forestall the accusation, he quoted Steven Pinker: “if the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.” How either of them could know such a thing was not explained. Instead, statistics were garnered to illustrate historical trends downward in death tolls from wars. The implication is that humans are evolving toward a culture of comity and amity.
But isn’t a few centuries “too short a time for evolution to have shaped human nature much”? And couldn’t the falling mortality be due to improvements in policing and medical care? Aren’t people using rationality to decide that war is counterproductive? It was time to rescue Darwin again:
A part of the answer that is consistent with an evolutionary approach is a long-term reduction in inequalities of life circumstances and prospects – the inequalities that Daly and Watson see as driving the conflict that leads to killing as a by-product. “In places such as Sweden where every cabbie drives a Mercedes,” says Daly, “people don’t bother to kill so often.” Better provisioning of life’s necessities has also powered the decline, agrees Duntley. When contested resources are made more plentiful, he says, conflict over resources decreases and homicide rates drop.
But for all its optimism, this idea sounds deterministic as well. Humans are just pawns of evolutionary and environmental pressures, he argued. When resources are plentiful, they don’t fight. Yet exceptions to this principle abound. There is no shortage of cases where criminals have attacked wantonly (e.g., Willy Horton) or nations fought ruthlessly (e.g., Napoleon), when resources were plentiful. Jones did not deal with the exceptions.
What about the morality in all this? Ah, that evolved, too. Dan Jones ended,
The evidence suggests that humans may indeed have what the Seville Statement called a ‘violent brain’, in as much as evolution may favour those who go to war. But evolution has also furnished us with a moral sense. The complexities of the relationship between morals and violence may prove a fruitful field for future research, in as much as they can be disentangled from the social and historical factors that clearly hold great sway over the ultimate levels of violence. Evolution is not destiny; but understanding it could help maintain the hard-to-discern progress of peace.
Nature decorated this article with photos of a boxer punching out his opponent, and a Napoleon-like figure on horseback leading his finely-dressed army into battle. No longer are these to be seen as images of rational beings who make choices based on morals and reasons. If Dan Jones and the evolutionists he quotes are right, they are pawns of evolutionary forces that play out on a game board of evolutionary-derived neurological propensities for aggression on one side and cooperation on the other. Presumably the evolutionary psychologist’s own rationality is exempt from the game.
1. Dan Jones, “Human behaviour: Killer instincts,” Nature 451, 512-515 (2008) | doi:10.1038/451512a; also published at News@Nature.
At the risk of sounding redundant, the views in this paper are dumb and evil. Dumb, because they are self-refuting and nothing but presupposition-driven conjectures. Evil, because the fruit of such thinking puts no limits on selfish aggression. If moral absolutes and rationality do not exist – if we are the evolutionary pawns of amoral forces – who is to abide by any claims of a “moral sense”? Morality becomes anything one says it is. Don’t fall for the made-up disclaimer that natural selection has lately favored cooperation. Give a dictator this doctrine and he will define his own morality to include genocide. If he were to succeed, his success would guarantee it was moral, because the only ones left to pass on their genes would be those he allowed to survive.
To the Darwin Party priestly class, the rest of humanity are their pets and lab rats. They speak flowery words of peace and morality, but they are conquerors at heart. They say they just want to “understand” human nature, but they envision themselves as disembodied rationalities above the game that traps the rest of us. They would presume to create the environmental conditions under which humans would be precluded from acting out their evolutionary propensities for violence, and could be manipulated for useful purposes – useful, that is, for their own utopian visions.
Once again, Dan Jones and the other Yodas he quoted presume to sit in some ethereal oligarchy looking down on an evolved world from an intellectual platform of privilege with no pillars. The arrogant plunderers arrogate to themselves the intellectual resources of the rest of the university. Like modern-day Gnostics possessing higher wisdom unavailable to us boxers and soldiers, they would sit in exalted privilege above the rabble, doling out Mercedes to the cabbies to keep them compliant. (Incorrigible non-cooperators like Christians, philosophers and theologians can be put in zoos, prisons, or otherwise disposed of so as not to jeopardize the regime.)
What do you do with people who believe things that are dumb and evil? For one thing, you don’t put them in positions of power, and you don’t give them control of the classroom. Their arguments cannot withstand a moment’s reflection. Using their own assumptions, the propositions in this article reduce to glorified chimpanzee screams as their proponents jump up and down on each other’s soulless chests. They can’t help themselves. Evolution made them this way. Their arguments, therefore, carry no intellectual weight, and are self-refuting. Remember, distinguished scholars, what happens to self-refuting propositions? They are necessarily false. They are not true, they cannot be true, and no amount of research or discovery or reflection will ever make them true. They’re D.O.A., dead, finished.
Consider that the most distinguished scientific journal in the world just gave pride of place to a self-refuting article! The situation is desperate. The evil dumb are threatening war against Mansoul. For its own survival, civilization must expose through rational means that the Darwinists are their own suicidal maniacs. By murdering mind and morality, they have demonstrated that they cannot win the game of survival of the intellectually and morally fittest.