Humanity is decidedly a territorial species. Since the control of limiting resources 15 has been a matter of life and death through millennia of evolutionary time, territorial aggression is widespread and reaction to it often murderous. It is comforting to say that war, being cultural in origin, can be avoided. Unfortunately, that bit of conventional wisdom is only a half truth. It is more nearly correct—and far more prudent—to say that war arises from both genes and culture and can best be avoided by a thorough understanding of the manner in which these two modes of heredity interact within different historical contexts.
Contractual agreement so thoroughly pervades human social behavior, virtually like the air we breathe, that it attracts no special notice—until it goes bad. Yet it deserves focused scientific research for the following reason. All mammals, including humans, form societies based on a conjunction of selfish interests. Unlike the
worker castes of ants and other social insects, they resist committing their bodies and services to the common good. Rather, they devote their energies to their own welfare and that of close kin. For mammals, social life is a contrivance to enhance personal survival and reproductive success. As a consequence, societies of nonhuman mammalian species are far less organized than the insect societies. They depend on a combination of dominance hierarchies, rapidly shifting alliances, and blood ties. Human beings have loosened this constraint and improved social organization by extending kinshiplike ties to others through long-term contracts.
Contract formation is more than a cultural universal. It is a human trait as characteristic of our species as language and abstract thought, having been constructed from both instinct and high intelligence. Thanks to ground-breaking experiments by the psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby at the University of California at Santa Barbara, we know that contract formation is not simply the product of a single rational faculty that operates equally across all agreements made among bargaining parties. Instead, one capacity, the detection of cheating, is developed to exceptional levels of sharpness and rapid calculation. Cheater detection stands out in acuity from mere error detection and the assessment of altruistic intent on the part of others. It is furthermore triggered as a computation procedure only when the cost and benefits of a social contract are specified. More than error, more than good deeds, and more even than the margin of profit, the possibility of cheating by others attracts attention. It excites emotion and serves as the principal source of hostile gossip and moralistic aggression by which the integrity of the political economy is maintained.
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
How does Wilson characterize the interaction between genes and culture—or, in the terms made familiar by earlier debates, between nature and nurture? How do "epigenetic rules" bridge the gap between these two sides?
According to Wilson, what role has natural selection played in the development of human psychology? Does he see any difference at all between the evolution of the mind and the evolution of the body?
How, according to Wilson, has human evolution been different from the evolution of any other species? What accounts for this key difference?
How have scientists such as Wilson gathered evidence for theories about human behavior in primitive conditions?
What does Wilson mean by the term "kin selection"? What evolutionary factors have led people to feel altruistic toward members of their own family?
What are the basic differences in mating strategies between males and females? How have these differences, according to Wilson, led to certain differences between male and female human nature?
Why, according to Wilson, are humans tribal and territorial? Are these traits that can be altered, or does Wilson present them as inherent parts of our psychological makeup? Explain.
What does Wilson say lies behind the human desire to cooperate and make agreements with other human beings? Why do we act altruistically toward people who are not closely related to us and do not therefore carry any of our genes?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
How does Wilson use the arguments of Charles Darwin in Origin of Species (p. 314)? Are his arguments about the evolution of human psychology consistent with Darwin's principles of evolution generally? Explain.
Do Wilson's theories tend to support Mencius's positive view of human nature (p. 78) or Hsun Tzu's more negative view (p. 84)? How might supporters of either of these theories appeal to biological or evolutionary evidence to support their claims?
How might biological evidence support or refute Thomas Hobbes's view of the state of nature as a state of perpetual war (p. 94)?
Would Wilson agree with Margaret Mead's view that warfare is a learned behavior rather than a biological imperative (p. 500)? What would Wilson single out as the basis of aggressive behavior in humans?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Compare or contrast Wilson's views on the interaction between nature and culture with those of Ruth Benedict in "The Individual and the Pattern of Culture" (p. 112).
Choose one of Wilson's categories of human behavior (kin selection, mating strategies, etc.) and use it as the basis for analyzing a book or a movie of your choice. You might, for example, examine the differences between male and female courtship strategies in a romantic comedy or the underlying reasons for violence in a war movie or historical epic.
Refute Wilson's argument that human behavior has a biological basis by arguing that humans don't behave as we would expect from the evolutionary factors that Wilson names. Include several examples in your response.
wangari maathai
Foresters without Diplomas
[2006]
WANGARI MAATHAI (1940-2011) was a Kenyan educator, activist, and politician. After studying biology in the United States, she returned to Kenya and received a Ph.D. in veterinary anatomy from the University of Nairobi in 1971. There she became the first female professor in the Department of Veterinary Anatomy.
Maathai is best known as the founder of Kenya's Green Belt Movement, an organization that trains women to plant trees in order to obtain a renewable fuel source and to combat both deforestation and soil erosion. Since it was formed in 1977, the Green Belt Movement has employed more than 30,000 women and has planted more than 51 million trees. Her involvement with the organization brought Maathai to national and international prominence and, increasingly, into conflict with the Kenyan government.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Maathai became an important part of Kenya's pro- democracy movement, which pressured the single-party government to allow competitive elections. She also played an important role in the coalition opposed to the powerful Kenya African National Union (KANU) Party. In 2002, the opposition parties finally succeeded in ousting the ruling party, and Maathai was elected to Parliament with 98 percent of the vote in her district. She held this position until her death in 2011 from ovarian cancer.
In 2004, Wangari Maathai became the first African woman ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. In awarding her the prize, the Nobel Committee praised "her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace." The selection here, "Foresters without Diplomas," is drawn from Maathai's 2007 memoir Unbowed. In this selection, she explains the factors that led to her conclusion that planting trees would be the best way to solve many of the problems in her country. As she narrates the events leading to the founding of the Green Belt Movement, she uses stories to illustrate that women can be empowered to solve some of the most complicated environmental problems of our day.
A great river always begins somewhere. Often it starts as a tiny spring bubbling up from a crack in the soil, just like the little stream on my family's land in Ihithe,[167]which starts where the roots of the fig tree broke through the rocks beneath the ground. But for the stream to grow into a river, it must meet other tributaries and join them as it heads for a lake or the sea. So, when people learn about my life and the work of the Green Belt Movement and ask me "Why trees?," the truth of the