Interview with richard alexander, an influential theoretician who uncompromisingly applies evolutionary theory to human behavior and morality

By Ann Arbor

Q: Некоторые виды живут группами. Но есть и такие, которые постоянно или периодически живут одни. В чем же недостатки групп?

A: There are lots of disadvantages of living in groups, and to understand why sexually reproducing organisms who are competing with one another live in groups you always have to find some definite advantages. It is not advantageous to just cluster, because when you do this, there are many individuals competing for the same food in one place, you may have to eat food that another animal already walked over or picked over, you have to defend your mates or fight for mates, etc. If you think in terms of Darwin’s "hostile forces of nature", you just go down through them one by one, you will find that living in a group is potentially harmful to almost everyone.

Q: Но ведь некоторые виды все-таки живут в группах?

A: I think there are only a few major classes of advantages of group-living. Cape hunting dogs can bring down large prey like zebras which is virtually impossible for a single hunting-dog. So if food comes in big chunks that are hard to overcome, then group-living can be advantageous on that basis. Sometimes it is advantageous to be in a group just as cover, if you can manage to get somebody else’s body between yours and the predator. As Hamilton pointed out, in herds the largest and strongest animals tend to be in the safest places. It can be profitable to have vulnerable individuals in the group, because they are the ones likely to be caught rather than yourself. Sometimes these herds become the places to go, because if you are alone, you are an easy target. Another possibility is aggressive defence by groups. Elephants are very good in protecting themselves and their young, and as the young are vulnerable, we would expect aggressive defence to start with protection of the young. If you are talking about a group of organisms where the group is composed of very close relatives, then other features enter in. Then you have individuals committing suicide to save their relatives.

Q: Почему люди живут большими группами? Ведь на Земле нет такого хищника, который бы мог нас так устрашить, что мы были вынуждены жить в группах?

A: I think that most people accept the hypothesis that early human group-living evolved as group-hunting or group-foraging, but why did human groups keep on growing, even when we were able to subdue our predators, and bigger groups would not do any good? My hypothesis, though Darwin and others had the same ideas, is that eventually other human groups became a very important driving force in causing human groups to get bigger and stronger. We know that today it is definitely other human groups that we see as our most important adversaries, and we design our social life to a large extent around the existence of those other groups. We have a hard time in escaping the tendency to divide the world into ‘us’ and all those other guys.

Q: В больших человеческих сообществах существует так называемый конфликт интересов. Почему же, несмотря на этот конфликт интересов, люди продолжают жить большими группами?

A: We have these things that philosophers call ‘moral systems’. It is instructive to realize that these systems tend to just go to the boundaries of the group; they tend not to include the members of other groups. Across the decades moral philosophers and other people have gradually come to the idea that moral systems are systems for keeping competing individuals together, by prescribing not to infringe beyond a certain point on the rights of others. I think that morality might have begun as the honouring by males of the pair bonds between other males and females. That would involve something very dear to everyone, namely the integrity of the family, and it would also involve that thing which is distinctly human, namely that we are able to get along with multiple males in the group. For example in Yanomamu Indians, any group that drops below seven healthy males, is said to be certain to disappear, by being taken over by another group. There are minimum-sizes, and these minimum-sizes are related to the sizes and strengths of the other groups around. So moral rules and systems are systems of controlling the tendencies of individuals to behave selfishly. And look, when we get into conflict with another group, that’s when the rules rise up in their importance. We expect people in time of war not to do things that take advantage of the circumstances, but rather to behave in the interests of the entire group. The risk is much larger if you don’t follow the rules and get caught at it when everybody is expecting everybody to be cooperative.

The University of Michigan, July 1996

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