Origins of Virtue, The: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation

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by: Matt Ridley

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If, as Darwin suggests, evolution relentlessly encourages the survival of the fittest, why are humans compelled to live in cooperative, complex societies? In this fascinating examination of the roots of human trust and virtue, a zoologist and former American editor of the Economist reveals the results of recent studies that suggest that self-interest and mutual aid are not at all incompatible. In fact, he points out, our cooperative instincts may have evolved as part of mankind's natural selfish behavior--by exchanging favors we can benefit ourselves as well as others. Brilliantly orchestrating the newest findings of geneticists, psychologists, and anthropologists, The Origins of Virtue re-examines the everyday assumptions upon which we base our actions towards others, whether in our roles as parents, siblings, or trade partners. With the wit and brilliance of The Red Queen, his acclaimed study of human and animal sexuality, Matt Ridley shows us how breakthroughs in computer programming, microbiology, and economics have given us a new perspective on how and why we relate to each other.

• Ridley's previous book, The Red Queen, was short-listed for the Writers' Guild Award for nonfiction.

Reviews:

Amazon.com
Human life, scientific journalist Matt Ridley suggests, is a complex balancing act: we behave with self-interest foremost in mind, but also in ways that do not harm, and sometimes even benefit, others. This behavior, in a strange way, makes us good. It also makes us unique in the animal world, where self-interest is far more pronounced. "The essential virtuousness of human beings is proved not by parallels in the animal kingdom, but by the very lack of convincing animal parallels," Ridley writes. How we got to be so virtuous over millions of years of evolution is the theme of this entertaining book of popular science, which will be of interest to any student of human nature.

From Library Journal
Relying heavily on game theory, zoologist and science writer Ridley focuses on how cooperation evolved in the generally selfish world of humankind. The result is a fascinating tale incorporating studies in theoretical and evolutionary biology, ecology, economics, ethology, sociology, and anthropology. Ridley details many complex behaviors, such as altruism in animals and humans, and reviews many anthropological investigations to show how these behaviors manifest themselves in differing groups. He also develops some absorbing ideas regarding extinct civilizations. Unfortunately, his conclusions are sometimes at odds with his claim that individual property rights are the key to conservation and that environmentalists are misguided. His criticisms of conservation efforts and of the concept of the "noble savage" can be one-sided, and his sources are limited. Still, the material will captivate a wide audience, including scholars who appreciate the original literature cited. Highly recommended.?Constance A. Rinaldo, Dartmouth Coll. Biomedical Lib., Hanover, N.H.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, David Papineau
If nice guys always finished last when our ancestors were scrabbling around for food on the African savanna, why does morality come so naturally to us now?

This is the question Matt Ridley aims to answer in The Origins of Virtue. Or, rather, he aims to provide a battery of answers. The evolution of altruism has been a topic of intense research for more than 20 years. While the biologically minded may still be a minority among social scientists, there are now enough of them to have produced a plethora of competing theories. Mr. Ridley is a distinguished British science journalist who proves an excellent guide to the current debate. Sometimes his eagerness to cover every angle means that different views are not always clearly distinguished, but he is never dull, and he illustrates the intricate logic of natural selection with many parables from ethology, anthropology and games theory.

From Booklist
Since Darwin taught us to view nature as a brutal competition among species, few philosophers have regarded virtue as a natural impulse. Yet it is to evolutionary biology, not ethical theory, that Ridley turns for an explanation of why people often sacrifice self-interest for the common good. With evidence from the latest research, he demonstrates that the hidden maneuvering of the genes punishes the egotist and rewards the saint. But don't expect the dance of the genes to follow a politically correct choreography: Ridley advances highly controversial arguments on the sexual division of labor, on the politics of environmentalism, and on the causes of war. Certainly, no one should look to these pages for a genetic formula for universal harmony and peace. But Ridley concludes with a compelling appeal for a renewal of natural communities in which our best instincts can flourish. At a time of rising fears about bioscience, Ridley still inspires hope that biology may be an ally, not a foe, in the fight for a moral world. Bryce Christensen

From Kirkus Reviews
How do organisms whose behavior is apparently determined by ``selfish genes'' become social beings, let alone altruists and saints? Ridley, former science editor of the Economist, looks to the growing field of evolutionary psychology for answers. This new discipline draws on insights from anthropology, economics, and politics, as well as on the evolutionary trends the author explored in The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (1994). Other organisms besides humans have learned to cooperate. The social insects have long been taken as models for human society; the division of labor they exhibit is one of the key advantages of social living. Vampire bats nest in large groups, and it is common for a successful hunter to share its meal with a neighbor, in hopes that the favor will be returned at a later date. This discovery leads to a digression on the famous ``prisoner's dilemma'' of game theory; the first studies seemed to show that the selfish player invariably wins. It now appears that a cooperative player with a ``tit for tat'' strategy will outlast the purely selfish one. Communal hunting raises interesting issues, too. Surplus meat is often traded for sex with an attractive female neighbor. Early modern humans so effectively hunted large animals that many--the mammoth, for example--became extinct. Another negative effect of large-scale cooperation is war. It is evidently difficult even for highly sophisticated social beings to abandon the notion that only their own tribe is really human and that others must be exterminated. The other side of the coin is trade, which depends on mutual trust. ``Trust is as vital a form of social capital as money is a form of actual capital,'' Ridley argues in a concluding chapter in which he attempts to draw lessons for the modern political arena. A provocative look at some of the central questions about what makes us human; strongly recommended.

In this terrific effort, another in a line of books that for me started with "Sociobiology" by Edward O. Wilson, Ridley gets to the heart of the matter in regard to human nature. He begins with a discussion of the "prisoners dilemma", and its emphasis on mutual aid, by using a story of Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin's escape from a Tsarist jail in 1876. We are quick to learn that the origin of virtue is trust, trust and the attendant cooperation that accompanies it. Indeed, this begs the question: "if life is just a competitive struggle, why is there so much cooperation about? And why, in particular, are people such eager cooperators?" This is Ridley's quest in writing this book, to find the roots of human society. As he says: " society works not because we conciously invented it, but because it is an ancient product of our evolved predispositions. It is literally in our nature."

In the summation chapter on trust, Ridley sums up his progression of arguments by showering favoritism on the idea of private property rights and free markets. He comes down as a champion of specialization and the division of labor when he avers that "its probably been a million years since any human being was entirely and convincingly self-sufficient: able to survive without trading his skills for those of his fellow humans." He allows, "we are far more dependent on other members of our species that any other ape or monkey. We are more like ants or termites who live as slaves to their societies. We define virtue almost exclusively as pro-social behavior and vice as anti-social behavior. One of the things that marks humanity out from other species and accounts for our ecological success, is our collection of hyper-social instincts." I might add that this is exactly what the economist Joseph Schumpeter had in mind when he referred to capitalism as a naturally occuring spontaneous ordering, a concept anathema to the collectivist, group oriented, anti-individualist souls on the political left. Hence, they call Ridley a Thatcherite while ignoring the evidence of this book which leads to an understanding of the correctness of Schumpeter's inescapable conclusion. Mutual cooperation and trust on an individual level lead to far greater surpluses for all than any concentration of power laid in the hands of government bureaucrats. No matter how one might have viewed the world before, this book should lead any open minded individual to Ridley's conclusion. I might add, we should be so lucky!

Ridley's aim is to get us to step out of our human skins and look back at our species with all its foibles, and see our evolved nature and how it is so readily distinguishable between ourselves and that of animals. And, one of the first differences one is struck by is the social evolution of man versus the apes: our lives in large groups, with all our complex inter-relationships among individuals, are far more advanced by magnitudes of order.

Ridley builds his case chapter-by-chapter beginning with and progressing through - genes, ants, termites, bees, Adam Smith, the Stone Age, the prisoners dilemma, game theory, hawks and doves, reputations and tit-for-tat, free riders, "cheaters, grudgers and suckers", the sharing of food (for sex), the spreading of risk, public goods and private gifts, emotions and the moral sense, theories of moral sentiments, cooperation and reciprocating altruism, tribes and pecking orders, the sources of war, trade where 2+2=5, merchant laws, ecology as religion, the great Stone Age extinctions, the fraud of Chief Seattle, property rights and incentives, and finally, trust - the foundation of virtue.

It's a great book and it never lets up. His examples are detailed and thought provoking. The curious reader might also consider "the Selfish Gene" by Dawkins, "Genome" and "Nature Via Nurture" both by Ridley, and "Born that Way" by William Wright. I might also include Dean Hamer as another author in this genre who is worth perusing.

This field is now labeled as "neo-Darwinism" though the original work by Edward O. Wilson was cased under the heading of "evolutionary psychology." With the unraveling of the gene string the changes are coming fast and furious, and for the inquisitive mind, not blinded by the usual Marxist-socialist dogma taught in academia, these books are an intellectual delight.

A Materialist Case for Ethics
Ridley's purpose is not to be the ethicist, but to provide an interdisciplinary account of our constitutional foundations as homo sapiens, in order for a moral theory to reflect these innate foundations. He succeeds masterfully. Indeed, Ridley's "The Origin of Virtue" succeeds in a way that Robert Wright's "The Moral Animal" fails. Whereas Wright focuses only on the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology and molecular genetics, Ridley incorporates both and adds ethology, comparative psychology, sociology, politics, economics, game theory, and paleontology. Wright's scope is myopic, whereas Ridley's scope is expansive. The outcomes could not be more radically different.

I dismissed Wright's book - not because it failed to explain Darwinism (it does so very well) - but because it failed to provide any moral insight from the Modern Synthesis. Ridley does not make this mistake: He takes homo sapiens as we are, both one with Nature, yet tellingly distinct and unique as a social and rational species. Ridley does this by using a broader armamentarium from which to analyze the origins of human virtue. Consequently, Ridley accomplishes far more than Wright in half the space and time..

Ridley's territory is too sophisticated and nuanced to be summarized into several single propositions. But he leaves no stone unturned, examining a plethora of human dynamics, i.e., the innate characteristics with which we are born, the usual pattern of development after our birth, and what is factual about the real, rather than the metaphysical, world. Suffice it to say that reciprocal altruism, kin selection, unit cohesion, symbiotic collaboration, ostracism, imitation, contextualism, emotion, trade, personal property, and mutual trust all dovetail along with reason to produce a distinctive human reality.

While homo sapiens may be grounded in nature and motivated by self-interest, accepting these facts does not condemn us to a Hobbesian state of affairs. As Ridley poignantly observes, individual and collective interests break apart only when we are coercively removed from our finer instincts. We are not a blank slate, after all, but born and nurtured to do remarkably virtuous things. Ridley advocates no particular ethical theory, but shows what a theory must provide in order for it to be commensurate with our being human and to be compatible with our original innate predispositions. Wright [supra.] advocates a utilitarian ethic, not because of some intrinsic feature of utilitarianism, but, well, just because. It's no surprise then that the ethical theory Ridley most respects is the theory of moral sentiments espoused by David Hume, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson in the eighteenth century. The link could not be more obvious: The theory of moral sentiments reflects on our empirical selves and how we are disposed to act towards others based on our own self-interests with benevolence.

Just because humans are genetically, physically, and biologically predisposed to act one way rather than another doesn't make such a predisposition ethically normative. Ridley avoids the naturalistic fallacy. His interdisciplinary account is intellectually and emotionally satisfying, because it draws on a plurality of disciplines to sort out our ethical origins and intuitions. Even though one does not get a complete ethical, political, or economic theory from Ridley, the implications are clear. For a fuller explication of his ideas, the reader will need to consult David Hume's "Treatise on Human Nature," Part III, or his "Enquiry into the Principles of Morals;" or Adam Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments;" or else Francis Hutchinson's numerous ethical essays. The political and economic implications of Ridley's account favors the writings of F.A. Hayek's "Constitution of Liberty," and other classical liberals.

At least Ridley opens the door between the Modern Synthesis and ethical, political, and economic theories. He does not have an overriding agenda (as in the Sociobiology debates), but clearly and articulately examines human nature from manifold perspectives - all grounded in empirical evidence. The result if refreshingly honest and candid; now it's up to us to decide what to do with this evidence. Highly recommended.

Why is the golden rule golden?

Disparate as they may be in other ways, the world's constituted religions have all created their own formulations of the "Golden Rule."

Christianity: "In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is law of the prophets." Jesus, Matthew 7:12.

Confucianism: "One word sums up the basis of all good conduct: loving kindness. Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself." Confucius, Analects 15:23.

Hinduism: "This is the sum of the Dharma (duty): do naught to others which would cause pain if done to you." Mahabharata 5:1517.

Islam: "Not one of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself." The Prophet Muhammad, 13th of the 40 Hadiths of Nawawi.

Jainism: "One should treat all creatures in the world as one would like to be treated." Mahavira, Sutrakitanga 1.11.33.

Judaism: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it." Hillel, Talmud, Shabbat 31a.

Sikhism: "I am a stranger to no one; and no one is a stranger to me. Indeed, I am a friend to all." Guru Granth Sahib, pg. 1299.

Taoism: "Regard your neighbor's gain as your own gain, and your neighbor's loss as your own loss." Lao T'zu, T'ai Shang Kan Ying P'ien.

Unitarian Universalist Association: "We affirm and promote respect for the independent web of all existence of which we are a part." Unitarian principle.

Zoroastrianism: "Do not to others whatever is injurious to yourself." Shayast-na-Shayast 13:29.

Native American Spirituality: "We are as much alive as keep the Earth alive." Chief Daniel George.

Baha'i Faith: "Lay not on any soul a load that you would not wish to be laid upon you and desire not for anyone the things you would desire for yourself." Baha'u'llah.

Buddhism: "...Treat not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful." The Buddha, Udana-Varga, 5.18.

In ascending their individual mountains of faith toward the same holy sky, the religions of the world have not only aspired to the divine but apparently also...their common humanity.

Matt Ridley nicely demonstrates here that there is no such thing as virtue and that altruism is an oxymoron. Instead it is all reciprocity and enlightened self-interest. This reminds me of when I was a sophomore in college. We used to argue passionately about three things: the nature of women, whether the Pope believed in God, and whether it was possible to act otherwise than in one's own self-interest. We concluded that women were an enigma wrapped in a mystery, etc.; that it wasn't clear whether the Pope believed in God or not; and that, barring mistakes, we always acted in our own self-interest. We further concluded that "altruism" was a word without real meaning, that the Pope was an amoral political animal, and that women were, regardless of their nature, VERY interesting. But we were sophomores. Matt Ridley is all grown up, and what interests him in this book is not so much the origin of virtue (although he does get heavily into that) but the restoration of the conservative agenda. Alas. He argues from biology (our nature) to what ought to be politically. This is doubly "alas" because Ridley preaches mightily against this very delusion, calling it a "reverse naturalistic fallacy" (p. 257).

David Ricardo and Adam Smith are brought into the fray, Hobbes and Machiavelli. Ridley takes arguments from game theory and political science and the world of high finance to make his point that virtue as it is ordinarily understood does not exist. He goes on to call for less government and more local autonomy, a return to a dream state of "everything small and local" (p. 264). As he does, Ridley comes dangerously close to taking on all the trappings of a right wing radio talk show host, spouting the virtues of Newt Gingrich and Margaret Thatcher on his way to becoming something like a high-toned Rush Limbaugh.

Alas, how sharp was his rapier and how telling his prose when Ridley stuck to revealing our social and sexual hypocrisy as he did so delightfully in The Red Queen (1993); but how obvious are his prejudices when he steps into the political arena. He actually argues that tried old irrelevancy of the embarrassed right wing, that even though Hitler was bad, very bad, he was better than Stalin. Thus on page 258 we have (referring to the doctrine of acquired characteristics embraced by the Soviet state): "Unlike the genetic determinism of Hitler, Stalin's environmental variety went on to infect other peoples."

Ridley even argues that Hitler got his ideas from the communists. "Hitler was merely carrying out a genocidal policy against `inferior', incurable or reactionary tribes that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had advocated..." (p. 253). So caught up in his cause is Ridley that he begins to contradict himself and argue for the kind of idyllic fantasy world that he condemns in Rousseauians. Thus in his chapter entitled "The Power of Property" he waxes nostalgic for the "egalitarian" conservation systems of New Guinea fishermen and Maine lobster men before the interference of big government. On page 262 he talks about "The collapse of community spirit in the last few decades, and the erosion of civic virtue...caused" by "the dead hand of the Leviathan." But on the very next page he declares, "I hold to no foggy nostalgia that the past was any better. Most of the past was a time of authority, too..."

Yes, Matt, it was. The authority of the war lord, of the feudal lord, of a system of social, political and economic imprisonment so oppressive that the average person never got further than a few miles from the place of his birth and had little to no chance of rising above the economic and social station of his birth. It was "small and local" with a vengeance. The tyranny of the feudal lords in Europe and, e.g., the war lords in China is conveniently ignored in Ridley's political fantasy. He claims that we have it better today only because of superior technology (p. 263) forgetting that our system of representative democracy in Republican form is also an improvement over the absolutism of the tribe. The sad lesson here is, that even a man as adroitly talented and as intelligent as Matt Ridley becomes just another propagandist when he ventures into an area in which he is emotionally involved.

Still there is a lot to enjoy in The Origins of Virtue. His discussion of the prisoner's dilemma is the best I've read, although his analysis of the "wolf's dilemma" (p. 55) is faulty. I won't go into it here, but "the tiny chance" that he refers to is overwhelmed by the fact that each player has only a five percent chance of "winning" by pushing his button since he has to beat 19 others to the punch. Consequently the best strategy is the obvious, don't push that button! (But check this out for yourself.)

His discussion of how the division of labor has enriched our world is interesting; his analysis of how we detect cheaters and how that is an instinctive human talent is persuasive; and his delineation of the nature of gift giving and receiving and how it relates to our innate sense of reciprocity is valuable as it shines light on the nature of "virtue." In fact, his entire argument is eminently worth reading. His glorification of trade (with which I agree) and his put down of ecologists (with which I disagree) is tolerable. Most fun though--recalling the Matt Ridley of The Red Queen--is in all the sacred cows he slaughters along the way: the New World Indians (ouch!), Margaret Mead, the so-called "tragedy of the commons" theory, the Noble Savage, even poor Chief Seattle is revealed as a slave-owner whose public reputation is largely the product of a screenwriter's imagination. (p. 214)