A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (14 page)

SOCIETIES AND INSTITUTIONS

It is not yet common practice to link the current social and national habitus of a nation to its so-called “history,” and especially to the state-formation process it has experienced. Many people seem to have the unspoken opinion that “What happened in the twelfth, fifteenth or eighteenth centuries is past—what has it to do with me?” In reality, though, the contemporary problems of a group are crucially influenced by their earlier fortunes, by their beginningless development.

—N
ORBERT
E
LIAS
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C
hinese society differs profoundly from European society, and both are entirely unlike a tribal African society. How can three societies differ so greatly when their members, beneath all the differences of dress and skin color, resemble one another so closely in terms of the set of behaviors that comprise human nature? The reason is that the three societies differ greatly in their institutions, the organized patterns of behavior that structure a society, equip it to
survive in its environment and enable it to compete with neighboring groups.

The institutions of Chinese, European and African societies have been deeply shaped by their respective histories as each responded to the specific challenges of its environment. The historical developments that shaped some of these institutions are described below. But it must first be noted that a society’s institutions, despite their rich cultural content, are not autonomous; rather, they are rooted in basic human social behaviors. These social behaviors, as described in chapter 3, lie at the foundation of human existence as a social species. They include an instinct to cooperate vigorously with members of an in-group, to obey the in-group’s rules and to punish those who deviate. There is an instinct for fairness and reciprocity, at least among members of the group. People have an intuitive morality, which is the source of instinctive knowledge that certain actions are right or wrong. People will fight to the death to protect their own group or attack that of others. Probably all these social behaviors, to one degree or another, have a genetic basis although, with the few exceptions already described, the specific underlying genes have yet to be identified.

Social institutions are a blend of genetics and culture. Each major institution is based on genetically influenced behaviors, the expression of which is shaped by culture. The human instincts for exchange and reciprocity probably undergird much of economic behavior but obviously the expressions of it, from farmers’ markets to synthetic collateralized debt obligations, are cultural. “The innate mental capacities of humans underlie personal exchange. These genetic features provide the framework for exchange and are the foundation of the structure of human interaction that characterizes societies throughout history,” writes the economist Douglass North, an authority on institutions.
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The exact mix of genetic predispositions and culture in institutions has yet to be resolved, he notes.

Warfare, religion, trade and law are social institutions found
throughout the world. Warfare is based on the deep-seated instinct to protect one’s family and group, as well as on predatory motives, such as stealing the women or property of others. The instinct for religious behavior, found in every society, was essential for group cohesion among early human communities and continues to play a leading role in modern societies, even though other institutions have assumed many of its former roles. Trade, as noted, is founded on the human instincts for exchange and reciprocity. Law is rooted in several complex social instincts, including those for following rules, punishing violators of social norms and the sense of personal transgression that underlies self-punishment and shame.

Without knowing the nature of the genes involved in social behavior, it’s impossible at present to disentangle the respective roles of culture and genetics in shaping social institutions. But language may provide a relevant example. The rules of grammar are so complex that it’s hard to think every infant learns them from scratch. Rather, there must be neural machinery that both generates rules of grammar and predisposes children to learn whatever language they hear spoken around them. The role of the genes is to set up this neural learning machine. But culture provides the entire content of language.

It is notable that the cultural component of language changes surprisingly quickly: the English of 700 years ago is barely comprehensible today. The genetic machinery has presumably stayed rather constant, given that the fundamental nature of language seems the same around the world.

A similar fusion of genetics and culture is probably present in religion. The fact that every known society has a religion suggests that each inherited a propensity for religion from the ancestral human population. The alternative explanation, that each society independently invented and maintained this distinctive human behavior, seems less likely. The propensity for religion seems instinctual, rather than purely cultural, because it is so deeply set in the human mind, touching the
emotional centers and appearing with such spontaneity. There is a strong evolutionary reason, moreover, that explains why religion may have become wired into the neural circuitry. A major function of religion is to provide social cohesion, a matter of particular importance among early societies. If the more cohesive societies regularly prevailed over the less cohesive, as would be likely in any military dispute, an instinct for religious behavior would have been strongly favored by natural selection. This would explain why the religious instinct is universal. But the particular form that religion takes in each society depends on culture, just as is the case with language.

The surprising longevity of many social institutions is commonly attributed to culture alone. Despite the malleability of culture and its ephemeral shifts under the influence of fashion, some cultural forms can persist for many generations and the material aspects of culture can be immensely stable—the spear has been around for millennia. But it’s just as likely that in social institutions that are a blend of culture and genetics, it is the genetic component that provides the stability. Genetically based social behavior takes many generations to change whereas culture tends to drift. Even in cases where stability would seem to confer great benefit, culture can shift quite dramatically in just a few centuries. Despite the advantage of constancy in communication, languages change every generation. Religions too depend strongly on the appearance of constancy and antiquity, yet their cultural forms change quite rapidly, as is seen in the shifting shapes of Protestantism in the United States; the Puritans gave way to Congregationalism which was succeeded by Methodism, which peaked around 1850 and was overtaken by the Baptists.

The genetically based social behaviors that undergird institutions can, like any other hereditary trait, be modulated by natural selection. Human social nature is much the same from one society to another, but slight variations in social behaviors can probably generate significant and long enduring differences in a society’s institutions.
A small difference in the radius of trust may underlie much of the difference between tribal and modern societies. The genetic basis of this behavior is unknown and so cannot be measured. But races and ethnicities are known to differ, for instance, in the structure of the MAO-A gene that controls aggression, as noted in chapter 3, and the differences in this gene may have been shaped by natural selection.

Institutional continuity that extends over many centuries, and over millennia in the case of China, may thus reflect the stability provided by the institutions’ genetic components. One indication of such a genetic effect is that, if institutions were purely cultural, it should be easy to transfer an institution from one society to another. But American institutions do not transplant so easily to tribal societies like Iraq or Afghanistan. Conversely, the institutions of a tribal society would not work in the United States—indeed, many of them would be illegal—even if Americans could figure out what tribe they belonged to. Afghans, in order to survive in conditions where central government is usually weak, have had to rely on tribal systems for protection over the centuries, and tribal institutions require behaviors—like blood revenge and the killing of female relatives deemed to have dishonored the tribe—which differ from those that are successful in, for instance, Scandinavian democracies.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of a human society adapting through institutional change is the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to settled groups, which started only 15,000 years ago. The new institutions of settled society required a thorough makeover of human social behavior. That may explain in part why it took modern humans so long to accomplish what might seem an
obviously desirable goal, that of settling in one place instead of roaming about and owning only what could be carried.

The great transition to settled life was not a single event. The ancestral human population was already dispersed across the globe when the transition started to occur. In each continent, the necessary behavioral changes occurred independently and took many generations to spread to almost everyone. Just as the populations of Europe and East Asia acquired pale skin through different genetic mechanisms, so too they independently developed the new social behaviors required to adopt a settled mode of existence. The seeds of difference between the world’s great civilizations were perhaps present from the first settlements.

The institutions of hunter-gatherer societies differed greatly from those of the settled societies they became. Hunter-gatherer bands, to judge by the behavior of living hunter-gatherers, consisted of just 50 to 150 people; when they grew larger, quarrels would break out and lead to division, usually along kinship lines.

Within the hunter-gatherer groups, there were no headmen or chiefs. Strict egalitarianism prevailed and was enforced. Anyone who tried to boss others about was firmly discouraged and, if that failed, killed or ostracized. Most hunter-gatherers have no property apart from the few personal belongings that can be carried. Their economies are therefore rudimentary and do not play a major part in their survival.

Genetically, hunter-gatherer systems probably gain stability from the fact that variance is suppressed by egalitarianism. Individuals with exceptional qualities, such as great intelligence or hunting skill, cannot take direct advantage of such talents to have more children because of rules that require a catch to be shared with others. The social behavior of hunter-gatherer groups thus had no particularly strong driving force toward change.

What made settlement desirable, despite the risks, was
population pressure. Hunter-gatherers require a large amount of land to provide the plants and animals they consume. After a time, even with high mortality due to incessant warfare, the available land started to run out. There was little choice but to make more intensive use of existing resources, for instance by gathering and planting wild grass seed and by controlling and penning wild animals. These practices eventually led, as much by accident as by design, to the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago.

The first settlements induced profound changes in human social behavior. Hierarchical systems were essential for organizing the larger numbers of people in settled communities. The egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers was abandoned. People learned the unaccustomed skills of obeying a boss. Their mental world too was transformed. The settled communities accumulated surpluses for the first time, and these could be traded. The management of these surpluses required a new kind of skill, and their defense entailed new forms of military organization.

In hunter-gatherer societies, the only division of labor was between the sexes: the men hunted and the women gathered. In settled societies, there was specialization of labor. In the wake of the specialization followed disparities of wealth.

The social and genetic variance of the society was greatly increased by these changes. A person with social skills and intelligence had a reasonable chance of getting richer, something that was seldom possible in a hunter-gatherer society, where there were no disparities and no wealth to speak of. Inequality in place of egalitarianism may not seem a good exchange, but the switch was essential for the new social structures required to operate large settled societies.

The elites that emerged in the first settled societies were able to raise more surviving children. They developed a keen interest in passing on their advantages of wealth and rank. But if the rich have more children and the population remains the same size, some children of
the rich must descend in social rank. The social behaviors of the elites could thus trickle down genetically into the rest of society. The ability of the rich to produce more surviving children created for the first time a powerful mechanism whereby natural selection could enhance successful behaviors. In societies where aggression paid, aggressive men would have more children. In those in which conciliation or trading abilities carried a payoff, people with these traits would leave the larger imprint on the next generation.

The rapid adoption of new social behaviors was required for reasons both internal and external to the new societies. Within each society, people needed a very different set of skills as they adapted to new institutions like specialization of labor. And the society itself had to adapt to external pressures, such as extracting resources from a changing environment and surviving in battle against other groups. Consider how radically two critical institutions, warfare and religion, changed in nature during the transition to settlement.

Warfare is an institution doubtless inherited from the joint ancestor of chimps and humans, given that both species practice territorial-based aggression. To judge from the behavior of living hunter-gatherer societies, harsh initiation rites at puberty taught young men to bear pain without flinching. Because members of a hunter-gatherer band or tribe are usually quite highly related to one another, kinship was a strong element of group cohesion. In settled societies, kinship was abandoned as an essential basis of military cohesion once population grew beyond a certain size. Leaders took advantage of the fact that men who had become habituated to hierarchy in daily life were willing to accept military discipline.

Religion too underwent a thorough makeover in settled societies. In hunter-gatherer groups, religion is often centered around communal dances. The dances are long and vigorous and extend far into the night. There is something about rhythmic movement in unison that instills a sense of belonging to a group. There are no priests
among hunter-gatherers; everyone in the group is an equal celebrant. People communicate with their gods directly, usually when some members of the group go into a trance induced by the dancing itself or by drugs.

In settled societies, by contrast, religious officials emerged as intermediaries between the people and their gods. The dancing was repressed: it represented a threat to religious authority since it allowed people to communicate with their gods directly instead of depending on the priests’ interpretations. Knowledge of the gods no longer resided in songs and verbal tradition; it was assembled in religious doctrines expounded by the priests.

Religion in early societies assumed a central structural role, with the ruler often appointing himself chief priest. The pharaoh of ancient Egypt was chief priest; Roman emperors often took the title of pontifex maximus. In early settled societies that lacked any formal system of justice or the apparatus of police and courts, religion and fear of the gods’ displeasure were essential means of maintaining order.
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People responded for the most part in cultural ways to the changing nature of institutions like warfare and religion. But both behaviors probably have an instinctual or genetic basis that can be adapted over the generations, just like any other form of behavior. In a tribal society, such as the Yanomamö of Venezuela and Brazil, aggressive men are valued as defenders in the incessant warfare between villages, and those who have killed in battle—the
unokais
—have on average 2.5 more children than men who have not killed, according to the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon.
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In other kinds of society, however, highly aggressive people are unlikely to prosper and will on balance have fewer children; the genetic predisposition for aggression will therefore fade over the generations, which is probably one reason why modern societies are less violent than those of medieval and earlier times.

Human social behaviors, from aggression to empathy, shape the institutions of each society, although all the details are supplied by culture. Since these institutions must change as a society’s ecological and military situation changes, every aspect of human social behavior is under constant pressure from natural selection. The great transition from hunting and gathering to settled life subjected human social nature to one set of pressures. Then began another remolding process, equally extensive—that of transforming the new villagers into the subjects of empires.