Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe

"This will be a slightly controversial book. I think we all know that human minds are very unusual. We moralise. We communicate through language in sophisticated ways. What’s obviously unique about humans are our brains and our social environment. But there’s something else that’s unusual about humans that we don’t often talk about: we’re the only animals that can kill at a distance. Because we can throw objects. We use spears and bows and arrows and—now—guns. But we started off throwing rocks. If you give a chimp a rock to throw, he’s going to miss the target most of the time, he’s terrible at it. But humans, fairly consistently, can throw hard and at a distance. It would be an enormous coincidence if the same animal that could kill at a distance was the same animal that had this weird social environment and weird brainpower. Lots of people have had a go at trying to connect the two. Often they’ve clearly been wrong from an evolutionary perspective. Warfare is the big one. People say, oh well, you need a social environment to make soldiers march and don’t hang around the back, so you need morals for welfare, and killing is to do with welfare, so the two must go together somehow. This doesn’t make sense until you’ve got a large society and enough territory to have big wars. You’re putting the cart before the horse. What Bingham realised—and it was Bingham first, in a paper—was that when you can kill at a distance, this dramatically lowers the cost of punishing other people. So imagine I’m a chimp, and I do something wrong, and some other chimp or even several other chimps decide I ought to be punished. Because they can’t kill at a distance, they’ve got to come close to me, and while they’re trying to kill me I’m trying to kill them back. There’s a 50/50 chance. Or, the biggest chimp will win. The morality doesn’t matter, and coalition doesn’t. So it’s hard to punish malefactors. In humans it’s different. If you and I are throwing rocks at each other, and let’s say it takes on average five minutes of rock-throwing for one of us to kill the other, it’s still 50/50. Nothing to do with morality; whoever is better at throwing is going to win. But if I come back with four friends, and we’ve all created a social connection and believe that you ought to be killed and we’re all throwing rocks, we’ll be throwing rocks at five times the pace, and we can all engage in the fight at once. It’s not like physical fighting where we have to be close and within your reach. So it’s only going to take one minute before we kill you, and there’s only a one-in-five chance that one of us will get killed. This is known as Lanchester’s square law. It was discovered in the First World War . It’s about the use of bullets, but it applies more broadly and means that the cost of punishing people, when you are in agreement that someone should be punished, are dramatically lower for humans than for other animals. And if the costs are lower, it’s more likely to evolve. Other academics have done some of the numerical simulations and, again, show what he predicted from that basic premise. So that’s the central idea. And of course, once you can gang up on people and punish them, all sorts of things become possible. If you start to trust people—because there’s this ultimate punishment—things like language become a lot more plausible, because you’ve got a reason to tell the truth. People can punish you if you don’t. If you look at animals, most animals, when they’re in groups they’re quite well connected. Wolves, chimps… there are odd exceptions, but mostly they’re groups of kin. In humans, that’s not how tribes work. And it’s not the way companies work. This is a fantastic book. It’s a labour of love for him and Souza. They’ve gone across all sorts of different disciplines, looking at the dates that people started evolving to throw, which you can measure. And when we started being able to speak—there are changes in the bones of the throat, which they can time quite well. Yes. For example, Herb Gintis has suggested that Bingham and Souza underplay the importance of child-rearing, the role of culture and the invention of fire in their analysis. I think you can probably connect the different things. As I was hinting with Buss, we might have evolved language for one really important reason—communicating or telling people where the prey were—then once you’ve got these language skills, they come in useful for sweet talk and other more specialised things. In this case, it may be that coalitional punishment—the thing that Bingham and Souza describe so brilliantly—first made co-operation in non-family groups possible. Once you’ve got that, it makes speech more useful—because you can trust people, or it makes different patterns of child-rearing possible. These, in turn, lead to whole new evolutionary pressures which change us in some other way and those changes introduce further pressures which we adapt to and so on. Then, at the end of the chain, when you have modern humans, you have to pick apart a whole cascade of different pressures and adaptations which have formed us. I don’t read Bingham and Souza as being closed to this. They’ve shown you can explain an awful lot—an astonishing amount—just by looking at the dynamics of group punishment—but I don’t think they believe that’s the end of the story. “If you’re frightened of controversy, evolutionary psychology is not the subject you should be studying” It feels to me like this argument is a little more heated than the debates around language, because it’s more nuanced. But I didn’t hesitate to include a controversial book because I think much of evolutionary psychology is. It’s not like studying 19th century physics; my physics lecturer told me, ‘this is how water pressure works and we know it is because we’ve known about it for 200 years and tested it.’ This is a new discipline, and by nature that means its got lots of theories. Over time they’ll be weeded down and we’ll have more confidence. The second reason is, you can’t rerun what happened tens of thousands of years ago. You’re left with bones, when you’re lucky. This is before people wrote history or poetry, you’ve no written records. A lot is trying to work out the most plausible story, then looking for evidence in the fossil record or in genes, or in the localisation of things in the brain that would falsify the theory. You can’t do what physicists do, which is rerun the experiment 5,000 times with slightly different conditions. So, if you’re altogether frightened of controversy, evolutionary psychology is not the subject you should be studying. It’s exciting that way. Yes. I think it does. This is going to sound very abstract, but when I was a physicist, one of the things that frustrated me was that, as a child, I’d imagined you’d study physics and learn how the universe is. And actually science is never like that. It’s always getting closer and closer approximations to the truth. It’s adding an extra term to the series, a mathematical series. The real truth is probably something that humans can’t comprehend very well. So I think science as an endeavour, once you get deep enough into it, is always frustrating. If you’re a philosopher, you can write something down and genuinely believe—at least you could have done, several thousand years ago—that you have got to the absolute truth about how the world is. You’ll be completely mistaken. Philosophers, I think, don’t get very far. I think science is the better way of coming to truth, but it always leaves you frustrated at the end. You come to the edge of the field and see there’s something you can’t understand, something you can’t test, or a time when you know you wouldn’t even know what an answer looks like."