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that anything universally human is untainted by genes. But our
' culture' does not have to be the way it is. Human culture could be very much more varied and surprising than it is: Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, live in promiscuous societies in which females seek as many sexual partners as possible and a male will kill the infants of strange females with whom he has not mated. There is no human society that remotely resembles this particular pattern: Why not? Because human nature is different from chimp nature: If this is so, then the study of human nature must have profound implications for the study of history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and politics. Each of those disciplines is an attempt to understand human behavior, and if the underlying universals of human behavior are the product of evolution, then it is vitally important to understand what the evolutionary pressures were. Yet I have gradually come to realize that almost all of social science proceeds as if 1859, the year of the publication of the
That sounds reasonable enough, and it would be splendid for those who believe in social engineering if it were true, but it is simply not true: Humanity is, of course, morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so. We stick to the same monotonously human pattern of organizing our affairs: If we were more adventurous, there would be societies without love, without ambition, without sexual desire, without marriage, without art, without grammar, without music, without smiles—and with as many unimaginable novelties as are in that list. There' would be societies in which women killed each other more often than men, in which old people were considered more beautiful than twenty-year-olds, in which wealth did not purchase power over others, in which people did not discriminate in favor of their own friends and against strangers, in which parents did not love their own children: I am not saying, like those who cry, 'You can't change human nature, you know, ' that it is futile to attempt to outlaw, say,
racial persecution because it is in human nature. Laws against racism do have an effect because one of the more appealing aspects of human nature is that people calculate the consequences of their actions: But I am saying that even after a thousand years of strictly enforced laws against racism, we will not one day suddenly be able to declare the problem of racism solved and abolish the laws secure in the knowledge that racial prejudice is a thing of the past. We assume, and rightly, that a Russian is just as human after two generations of oppressive totalitarianism as his grandfather was before him. But why, then, does social science proceed as if it were not the case, as if people 's natures are the products of their societies?
It is a mistake that biologists used to make, too. They believed that evolution proceeded by accumulating the changes that individuals gathered during their lives. The idea was most clearly formulated by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, but Charles Darwin someti mes used it, too: The classic example is a blacksmith 's son supposedly inheriting his father 's acquired muscles at birth: We now know that Lamarckism cannot work because bodies are built from cakelike recipes, not architectural blueprints, and it is simply impossible to feed information back into the recipe by changing the cake:' But the first coherent challenge to Lamarckism was the work of a German follower of Darwin named August Weismann, who began to publish his ideas in the 1880s: 2 Weismann noticed something peculiar about most sexual creatures: Their sex cells—
eggs and sperm—remained segregated from the rest of the body from the moment of their birth: He wrote: 'I believe that heredity depends upon the fact that a small portion of the effective substance of the germ, the germ- plasm, remains unchanged during the development of the ovum into an organism, and that this part of the germ- plasm serves as a foundation from which germ-cells of the new organism are produced. There is, therefore, continuity of the germ-plasm from one generation to another. '; In other words, you are descended not from your mother but from her ovary. Nothing that happened to her body or her mind in her life could affect your nature (though it could affect your nurture, of course—an extreme example being that her addiction to HUMAN NATURE
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drugs or alcohol might leave you damaged in some nongenetic way at birth). You are born free of sin. Weismann was much ridiculed for this in his lifetime and little believed. But the discovery of the gene and of the DNA from which it is made and of the cipher in which DNA's message is written have absolutely confirmed his suspicion.
The germ-plasm is kept separate from the body.
Not until the 1970s were the-full implications of this realized. Then Richard Dawkins of Oxford University effectively invented the notion that because bodies do not replicate themselves but are grown, whereas genes do replicate themselves, it inevitably follows that the body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene, rather than vice versa. If genes make their bodies do things that perpetuate the genes (such as eat, survive, have sex, and help rear children), then the genes themselves will be perpetuated. So other kinds of bodies will disappear: Only bodies that suit the survival and perpetuation of genes will remain:
Since then, the ideas of which Dawkins was an early champion have changed biology beyond recognition. What was still—
despite Darwin—essentially a descriptive science has become a study of function: The difference is crucial. Just as no engineer would dream of describing a car engine without reference to its function (to turn wheels), so no physiologist would dream of describing a stomach without reference to its function (to digest food). But before, say, 1970, most students of animal behavior and virtually all students of human behavior were content to describe what they found without reference to a function. The gene-centered view of the world changed this for good. By 1980 no detail of animal courtship mattered unless it could be explained in terms of the selective competition of genes. And by 1990 the notion that human beings were the only animals exempt from this logic was beginning to look ever more absurd. If man has evolved the ability to override his evolutionary imperatives, then there must have been an advantage to his genes in doing so. Therefore, even the emanci-pation from evolution that we so fondly imagine we have achieved must itself have evolved because it suited the replication of genes.
Inside my skull is a brain that was designed to exploit the
conditions of an African savanna between 3 million and 1 00,000
years ago: When my ancestors moved into Europe (I am a white European by descent) about
