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The Evolution of Social Behaviour (by Protagoras, 5/5/07) Why is it that some behaviours take root and persist for centuries in societies despite their seeming obviously dysfunctional? Religions are full of obsessive injunctions and prohibitions on matters of no importance, such as the Judaic ban on eating shellfish, not likely long to trouble desert tribes. But some religious injunctions have to do with fundamental aspects of how a society lives and functions, and its these we are going to look at. How do we know, when we are looking at a set of behaviours, that they are really dysfunctional? After a few centuries of looking at other societies as ignorant, barbarous and supersititious when different, its lately become fashionable in the West to start with the presupposition that the difference reflects greater inherited wisdom that we have lost touch with. One popular method of explanation is to argue that the behaviour is in fact adaptive. It was argued that the Islamic and Judaic prohibitions on pork were due to the dangers of trichinosis. The weakness of the method became clear when it emerged (i) that trichinosis is not particularly dangerous (ii) that cattle suffer from illnesses which are more dangerous. It was then argued (by Marvin Harris) that the extent of the ban coincides geographically with areas where the practice of rearing pigs would lead to social catastrophe. A herd of cattle or sheep can be moved. A herd of pigs cannot. Cattle and sheep forage and eat grass. Pigs must be fed grain and scraps. In a severe drought, pigs would die, and their owners with them. But, the argument goes, the rearing of pigs and eating of pork is so attractive during periods of plenty, that only a religious prohibition, enforced with all the zeal and violence and prohibition of debate which usually accompanies these, would be effective. Hence the surviving peoples of the Middle East all have in their religions the injunction that the pig is unclean. Religious injunctions embedded in society have a unique and valuable property: they persist and are enforced and regardless of apparent utility. So it is that the Islamic residents of Manchester would be horrified by the idea of bacon and eggs, though they have not had to move their herds of livestock in a famine for many generations, and in any case, declining to eat bacon with their eggs now would not help them do it. Similar arguments have been applied to explain the cult of the cow in Hinduism - the cow's output in terms of fuel and milk, from essentially waste vegetation, is enormously valuable and could only ultimately be safeguarded by a total prohibition on slaughter, which in turn could only be safeguarded by a religious veneration of the animal. The laws of caste are similarly argued to safeguard an immigrant conquering caste from infections to which it had no immunities. The most striking examples however are not these, but are to do with the treatment of women and sexuality. Let us begin by looking at a practice which is common and arguably justifiable: male circumcision. The Old Testament and Middle Eastern legend are full of stories of divine wrath visited on the inhabitants of the region because their bed time amusements were frowned on. One can construct an argument from this along the following lines. Periods of great sexual austerity come to seem pointless and life-denying, so are suceeded by periods of relaxation and indulgence. However, sexual promiscuity in a fairly closed group is a recipe for the transmission of any disease which can be carried in exchanges of bodily fluids. STDs typically have a strong negative impact on fertility. Sexual revolutions are thus self limiting. Now, circumcision has been shown to decrease susceptibility to aids and probably to other STDs. Could it have been that in Biblical and pre Biblical times, epidemics of infection led to the evolution of the practice in the standard way: those who did it survived better than those who did not? It is at least half way plausible, it rests on a factual foundation (diminished susceptibility), and it concerns a practice which has no very fundamental impact on how social life is pursued. However, when we look at a map of Europe and the Middle East, we notice another aspect of the regulation of sexual behaviour and the position of women. As you move north and west from the Arabian Peninsula and Iranian desert, things change dramatically. We start with societies in which women are covered from head to foot in black, in which the sexes are almost totally segregated outside the immediate family (and often within the family residence). The public display of almost any part of the naked body by either sex is prohibited, so the wearing of shorts is taboo. Any form revealing clothing is covered; exercise shops with street facing windows where the patrons can be seen at work have offended Orthodox Jews in Canadian cities. The practice is uncannily replicated in the Christian as well as the dominant Islamic religion by the garb and institution of the nunnery. Who has not looked at a nun in Italy and been struck by the similarity of the robe to the Chador? In these societies, sexual irregularities are punishable by death. Public stoning is the penalty for adultery in Saudi Arabia, as it was among the Jews in the Old Testament. We have the extraordinary cases of teenage girls being publicly hanged in Iran, or murdered by their immediate families in the name of family honour in Turkey, for what would be as ordinary as eating chocolate in France or Holland. In England in immigrant families from Asia (not exclusively of the Islamic persuasion), women are regularly murdered by their close relatives, often with the active consent of their own mothers, for declining to comply with the wishes of their families in who they marry. Moving west and north, we arrive in the Italian Peninsula, where in the South murders of women on the grounds of honour were also common and judicially condoned. It was for a long time an accepted principle of law that a man might reasonably become irrational at the thought of an insult to his honour, and could not then be held accountable for his actions. The principle was that even the thought, the suspicion, of such an insult, could prey on his mind and understandably drive him to kill his wife in particular. Curiously, this bizarre condition seems only to affect men in the South. Try it on in Milan, and you'd get a very short hearing. What is so special about the South? At the end of such a journey we arrive in Scandinavia, where Montaigne's remark on the infidelity of women seems to be the prevailing social norm: 'Quand on le sait, c'est peu. Quand on le sais pas, c'est rien". When you know, its a small thing, when you don't, its nothing. In north western Europe, chastity of either sex, whether married or single, is an amusing eccentricity, and a lapse certainly not grounds for criminal penalties or murder. This is clearly very different from eating pork. The effort to control human sexuality in the Middle East has necessitated enormous expenditure of resources, and has in addition imposed huge opportunity costs on the societies which have successfully done it. Take the Iranian morality police, who scrutinize the public dress and conduct of women and take action when either is insufficiently modest. They are all paid, they all have offices, uniforms, adminstrators. A public execution is an expensive affair. Take the Saudi prohibition on women driving, or being in company with men not their husbands or brothers or fathers. How could a company following such rules have a competitive cost position when compared to the average firm in Europe or the Far East? It would be wonderfully interesting if it could be done, to estimate the opportunity and actual costs. However, let us accept that they must be huge since they are regulating half of a society and a fundamental human instinct, and ask a different question: can this be adaptive, from an evolutionary point of view, and if so, to what? It is not plausible to argue that it must be driven by an evolutionary imperative to limit STDs. The remedy is out of all proportion to the evil, and epidemics of STDs for which we have historical records in European societies have not led to such social structures. In the UK, the outbreak of syphilis which followed the siege of Naples around 1500 is chronicled in Measure for Measure, and may have spurred the restriction of morals that were such a prominent feature of Puritanism, with its prohibition of theatres and dances. But nothing like the scale of the Middle Eastern code was even approached. Around 1900 we had another epidemic, which is referred to in Ibsen's Ghosts. Again, no such reaction. I have offered earlier an explanation of the practice of circumcision in terms of STDs, but readily concede that a weakness of this is the lack of any historical record of epidemics. The lack of this record argues strongly against the structuring of a whole society to avoid them. No, we must suppose that the restriction of sexuality in the form we see it today has not evolved because of its public health utility. So why has it evolved? Two, non exclusive, conjectures are possible. First, it could be that the inhabitants of the region have some combination of lifestyle and propensities which make promiscuity threatening to their societies in a way that it is not in Northern Europe. Perhaps they are more passionate and also more aggressive than the Northerners? This explanation was common in the past in Europe, and one finds sly references in Gibbon's account of the early Christians to the "hot virgins of [North] Africa". The explanation usually rested on climate and the effects of the sun. Perhaps this passionate nature coincides with a social structure based on the extended family, tribe or clan, so that jealousies and disputes, instead of remaining matters affecting individuals, start to involve whole groups in the wars of the Hatfields and McCoys? One could imagine a situation in which regular disastrous blood feuds over women among peoples occupying a region led to their relative lack of evolutionary success compared to peoples who had found some way, however expensive, to eliminate them. Or perhaps the relative peace in which these peoples were able to live enouraged imitation. The weakness of this explanation is that a reading of the early history of Medina seems to show the perennial ability of humans everywhere to fight to the death over anything - if they had eliminated fighting over women, they found plenty of other things to fight over. However, its advantage as an explanation is that it explains the persistence of the social structure. Once set, such a structure would be highly resistant to change, because the forces that can be brought to bear on the disobedient are formidable - those of the whole clan. A second explanation has to do with the utility of the sexual repression of young men in motivating them to outwardly directed violence. The great Islamic conquests of the sixth century onward required enlistment of quantities of young men. There are examples, for instance the Zulus under Chaka, in which military prowess was directly linked by a society to sexual opportunity. The same thing may have happend in some South American tribes studied by Chagnon. The difficulty with this explanation is that the practice probably was in force before, and appears to have persisted long after, the Islamic Middle Eastern societies lost their emphasis on conquest, and that the same mores are found among other inhabitants of the region whose mores and religions were not oriented to conquest. We are thus obliged to consider the possibility that the social organization of Middle Eastern societies in respect of the regulation of sexuality and the role of women is simply an evolutionary dead end, observed however before it has become extinct. After all, had we observed the Dodo in 1600, it would perhaps have looked like a successful adaptation to its environment. How are we to tell? If we cannot find good reasons of public utility, we should not shrink from concluding there are none. Traditional wisdom doesn't override rationality. The issue emerges even more clearly from our last example: the practice of female genital mutilation in much of the African continent. The negative effects of this are evident. Leave aside the human consequences for the victims, it is a public health disaster. It facilitates the spread of STDs, it is itself the cause of infections, it makes childbirth more dangerous. And yet it persists, and has even been tacitly condoned by some Western feminists who have felt unable to condemn an authentically traditional folk practice. Surely, we have to say, there are cases where some social behaviours have arisen and persist despite being wicked, irrational, maladaptive and of absolutely no survival value. With female genital mutilation we are looking at a sort of heart of darkness whose existence has effectively been denied by poltically correct attitudes to non-Western cultures. The only explanation for is Calvin's: original sin. But, we are perhaps observing these practices and the societies which encapsulate them at a point while a slow process of evolutionary extinction is in progress. That is, there are ways of life which, while traditional, are indeed barbaric, superstitious and unjustifiable. They should not exist surely? Traditional wisdom should have taken care of it. No, it will not. The only thing that will let us diagnose them correctly is the wisdom of the Enlightenment. Rational assessment. Lets apply it next to our own folkway, Moloch, the automobile, and the thousands, hundreds of thousands, no, millions of live human sacrifices it exacts from us every year. The problem with the general approach of tolerance and justification of perverse folkways is not that it leads us to tolerate barbarity in the third world, but that it leads us to tolerate barbarity at home. For more on a wide array of other topics, please visit the oftwominds.com weblog. 
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