Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

The continual coordination required of early human social life coevolved with morphological changes that gave rise to our remarkable capacity to communicate, which is unlike that of any other species in terms of precision, flexibility, sensitivity, and band width. Unlike our primate relatives, the human face has relatively little obscuring hair (which most likely was lost in the hot African savannah, for purposes of cooling), making it a beacon of social messages. And our facial anatomy includes more facial muscles than those of our primate relatives, in particular around the eyes, allowing for a much richer vocabulary of expressive behavior originating in the face.

The evolving capacity to communicate is even more pronounced in the human voice. With emerging bipedalism in our hominid predecessors, the human vocal apparatus evolved dramatically. Compared to our primate predecessors, the human vocal tract is elongated. As a result, the tongue has greater range of movement at the back near the larynx, allowing for the capacity to produce a remarkable variety of sounds. Some of the great apes, for example, have an extremely limited repertoire of vocalizations, which reduces to a few grunts. Humans, in contrast, can exhort, punish, threaten, tease, comfort, soothe, flirt, and seduce with the voice.

Our evolving capabilities to communicate co-evolved with our broader capacity for culture, our tendency to produce artifacts, to imitate, to represent and spread information across time and space with language. As charming as chimps and bonobos are, careful studies of their social existence find little evidence of anything remotely resembling culture—a point many have recently made in suggesting that the human capacity for imitation, symbolic language, memory, and coordination is radically different from that of our primate relatives. In humans our basic emotional tendencies can quickly spread to others, through mimicry, imitation, and communication. The spread of emotions like compassion, love, and awe becomes the basis for social ritual and ethical guidelines, and binds individuals into cooperative groups.

CRO-MAGNON CEOS

 

Our Cro-Magnon anthropologist would readily discern a third feature of early human social life—that it is hierarchical. Every moment of early hominid social life, from who sleeps with whom to who eats what to who touches whom, was stratified. In contemporary humans, individuals fall into social hierarchies with remarkable ease. In research with my colleague Cameron Anderson, we have found that hallmates, within one week of having moved into college dormitories, are nearly unanimous in singling out those whom they report to be of high status, having respect, prominence and influence in their emergent groups. They likewise readily agree in their judgments of who occupies the lower rungs of the totem pole. Differences in status quickly emerge in younger children (down to two years old, where status hierarchies have been observed on the seemingly egalitarian circle rugs of preschools). And don’t be fooled by gender-based assumptions: The concern for status is not just a male thing. Female adults attain comparable levels of status with just as much alacrity and effect. This is echoed in recent studies by Frans de Waal and others, who have documented clear hierarchies in female chimpanzee life. Primate social life is hierarchical, in large part because hierarchies enable group members to decide how to allocate resources with speed and minimal conflict.

Yet the hierarchical social organization of higher primates and early humans differs dramatically from that of other species. In higher primates and humans, lower-status individuals can readily form alliances, most typically dyadic coalitions, which potentially negate many advantages that higher-status individuals might enjoy in physical size or power. In addition, humans developed several forms of social communication—for example, gossip—by which low-status individuals can comment upon and determine the status of other group members. The emergence of coalitions and alliances in group life, and the capacity for low-status individuals to comment on the reputations of those in power, placed new demands upon high-power individuals. Their power would come to rest increasingly upon the ability to engage socially and advance the interests of the group.