Philosophical essay on the evolutionary origins of human violence

incidental consequence, a hunger to watch violence and to see it as entertainment. It allowed our feelings of inequity and envy to morph into schadenfreude, retaliation, and spite. It allowed us to enjoy violence as perpetrators and spectators. It allowed us to put our money on feeling good about righting an injustice. Why oh why? Why did evil, expressed as excessive harm to innocent others, evolve? The answer lies, so I suggest, ina special property of the human brain. Some time after we diverged from a chimpanzee-like common ancestor, the human brain was remodeled to allow promiscuous connections between previously unconnected circuits. Promiscuity enabled us to explore new problems using a combination of older, but nonetheless adaptive parts. Some of these novel explorations led to highly adaptive consequences, as when we developed the ability to self-deceive in the service of pumping ourselves up to do better in the context of competition; or when we invented new technologies to solve difficult environmental problems, such as using spears to capture prey at a distance; or, when we acquired the know-how to stockpile and enhance resources such as food, water and fertile land that are critical to individual survival and reproduction; or when we evolved the richly textured social emotions of jealousy, shame, guilt, elation, and empathy, feelings that motivate individuals to recognize the importance of others’ well-being and interests and to correct prior wrongs; or, when we tapped into the rich connection between reward and aggression to punish cheaters trying to destabilize a cooperative society. But these same adaptive explorations also resulted in incidental costs that have destroyed the lives of innocent individuals. The capacity to deny others’ moral worth enabled us to justify great harms, including self-sacrifice as living bombs designed to annihilate thousands of non-believers. The capacity to create advanced weaponry enabled us to kill at a distance, thereby avoiding the aversiveness of taking out those staring back. The capacity to stockpile resources led to the growth of greed, increasing disparities anong members of society, the inspiration to steal, and heightened violence both to defend and to obtain. The capacity to experience social emotions such as jealousy led to blind rage and a driving engine of homicide, including cuckolded lovers who kill their spouses and stepparents who kill their stepchildren. The capacity to feel good about harming others enabled us to recruit this elixir in the service of causing excessive harm in any number of novel contexts, from ethnic cleansings to bizarre fetishes that include self-mutilation. And the list goes on. This is the yin and yang of promiscuous thinking. This is the natural history of evil, its ancestry and adaptive significance. This evolutionary explanation sets the stage for unpacking the recipe for evil, how it develops within individuals and societies, ingredient by ingredient. Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 50 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012796