On February 24, the world watched in horror as Russian missiles were fired across the border and their tanks rolled into Ukraine. It was just 3 decades ago that the Cold War ended as the USSR collapsed from within, and now a new Cold War is about to unfold. Is it possible that the tribalism generating this conflict became embedded in human DNA through evolution?
During his global expeditions, Charles Darwin observed behavior in which individuals sacrificed self-interest to tribal benefit. It occurred to him that the innate biological propensity to pursue self-interest might be partially curtailed by a biological inclination toward cooperation. In The Descent of Man, he describes how a propensity for cooperation may have provided an advantage in inter-tribal contests for survival.
When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other … The advantage which disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined hordes follows chiefly from the confidence which each man feels in his comrades. … Selfish and contentious people will not cohere and without coherence nothing can be effected. A tribe rich in the above qualities would spread and be victorious over other tribes.
Building on his argument for the biological evolution of human cooperation, Darwin proposed what is now seen to be a prescient inference about the origins of altruism and our moral sense as a derivative of our acquired instinct for cooperation:
Ultimately a highly complex sentiment, having its first origin in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, confirmed by instruction and habit, all combined, constitute our moral sense or conscience.
Darwin was suggesting that human tribes with a propensity for cooperation survived and procreated, eventually internalizing these acquired instincts into a moral sense. Similarly, in most mammalian species, maternal love, evidenced by a mother’s willingness to put herself at risk to protect her offspring, is an innate altruism that contributes to tribal survivability. Darwin’s remarkable insight, confirmed more than a century later in animal studies, was that tribal loyalty is biological rather than spiritual.
Although social psychologists originally believed that tribalism and the kinds of prejudice it promotes was a learned behavior, more recent research is suggesting that it is inborn. In a seminal study, Henri Tajfel divided 64 adolescent boys into two randomly chosen groups. The participants were told that they were selected for their group because they revealed similar preferences for art–a deception designed to promote a within-group loyalty. Tests applied at the end of the study revealed that members of the same group felt a closer connection to each other than to members of the other group (in-group bias). Furthermore, they felt that those in the other group were more alike than members of their own group (out-group homogeneity effect). While tribalism offered survival advantages to our ancestors, Tajfel cautioned:
Socialization into ‘groupness’ is powerful and unavoidable; it has innumerable valuable functions. It also has some odd side effects that may–and do–reinforce acute intergroup tensions whose roots lie elsewhere. Perhaps those educators in our competitive societies who from the earliest schooling are so keen on ‘teams’ and ‘team spirit’ could give some thought to the operation of these side effects.
Psychologists who were reluctant to accept the innate violent nature of tribalism pointed to the fact that such tribalism had not been observed in our closest cousin– the chimpanzee–who shares 98% of our DNA. The chimpanzee was believed to be one of the few primates that does not kill other members of its species for territorial acquisition. However, in 2010, anthropologist John Mitani and his colleagues completed a ten-year study in which they observed a large chimpanzee community at Ngogo, Kibale National Park in Uganda. During this time, they witnessed the Ngogo chimpanzees killing 18 members of a rival group and then occupying their territory. In their publication titled, Lethal Intergroup Aggression Leads to Territorial Expansion in Wild Chimpanzees,Mitani et al. state, “A causal link between lethal intergroup aggression and territorial expansion can be made now that the Ngogo chimpanzees use the area once occupied by some of their victims.” These findings support Darwin’s suggestion that the pursuit of territorial conquest may be an innate part of human nature that we and some other primates have developed as a survival advantage.
On December 21, 2015, the US top-secret report Strategic Air Command Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959 was declassified. Contained in that report was the list of 1100 Soviet-bloc airfields and 1200 population centers in the Soviet Union that were targeted by the US for nuclear destruction in the event of a nuclear war. The US Strategic Air Command was committed to the idea that winning a nuclear war would require a quick preemptive or reactive strike that would quickly incinerate millions of people and devastate the enemy.
Stephen Schwartz, author of Atomic Audit called the target list “grim and frankly appalling.” However, the lessons of history have taught us that humans are territorial animals and the ongoing competition for land and resources demands that military escalation by a rival be met with a sufficient deterrent. Indeed, World War II taught us that if the Allies had been unwilling to engage in war with the Axis Alliance they would have become subject to the tyranny of those aggressors. Even prominent intellectuals like Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell–originally pacifists–revised their opinions on the necessity of preparing for war in the face of a bellicose adversary.
Those who recommend building a strong military for defence have often been regarded as paranoid or xenophobic, but history and now neurology, is teaching us that humans can behave differently in groups than they would ever behave as individuals. The fact that intelligent humans could coldly contemplate the brutal annihilation of millions of fellow members of our species is a grim reminder that our tribal reaction to a perceived threat resides in our DNA. Our capacity to dehumanize those in the out-group, that evolved to reduce our empathy depletion, enabled us to reinforce the survival of our tribe while saving our species from overpopulation. Until we control the tribal elements of our nature that served during our evolution, our species will continue to live under the cloud of potential annihilation. This blog is an excerpt from Intelligence, IQ & Perception, available at https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/intelligence-iq-perception/
