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The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology Paperback – August 29, 1995
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- Print length496 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateAugust 29, 1995
- Dimensions7.76 x 5.08 x 0.44 inches
- ISBN-100679763996
- ISBN-13978-0679763994
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- Publisher : Vintage; Reprint edition (August 29, 1995)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 496 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0679763996
- ISBN-13 : 978-0679763994
- Item Weight : 4.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.76 x 5.08 x 0.44 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #60,148 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #23 in Evolutionary Psychology (Books)
- #165 in Medical General Psychology
- #1,506 in Personal Transformation Self-Help
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About the author

Robert Wright is a contributing editor of The New Republic, a Slate.com columnist, and a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the cofounder of www.bloggingheads.tv, runs the web-based video project www.meaningoflife.tv, and lives in Princeton, NJ, with his wife and two daughters.
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Now of course evolutionary psychology makes us look at the seemingly heightened level of morality of the Victorian era with a skeptical eye. It's an evolutionary advantage to fit in and even prosper in the social environment you are in, and that's the underlying reason why people seek respect and social status. The norm in Victorian times was to approach your neighbors with upmost charity and respect. Never uttering insults and always willing to go out your way to help if possible. Perhaps maybe it was because the towns in England in the 19th century were small, and everybody knew each-other? It was a much bigger disadvantage to be rude because a slight on your reputation can spread to everybody quickly. This is diametric to the city life today, where people are criticized as being indifferent, irreverent, and impolite. Subconsciously whether we deny it or not, we behave different depending on if we know we are going to see somebody again or if they are in our "inner circle".
Understanding the subject matter is important because when we inherit an evolutionary psychological view we gain the capability to view our behavior as a species in a perspective we may have not considered beforehand. This perspective can bring clarity and understanding. There will be speculation but it will be grounded speculation. For example, why are we inclined to care about the opinions of others that we know we will never see again? Part of the explanation can be that in our ancestral environment we were always much more likely to encounter the same person again. Our understanding of evolutionary psychology will have a huge impact on our understanding and mending morality in the future. Through this new paradigm, we get some clarification that men for example are not "pigs" or "wrong" because they want to instinctually mate with as many women as possible. Also, women are not "evil-creatures" because they cheat sometimes. That is not to say that each example is morally "right", especially when taken ad-nasauem. But perhaps these understandings will garner sympathy and understanding for our human nature. In a sense, our understanding of this subject will bring on worry and legal issues. But remember, it is not an evolutionary advantage for males and females to inherit these behaviors in full. And as far as the law and policy goes, understanding animal/human nature will go a long way in helping reshape things. An example is poverty and why thanks to our understanding of human nature it is justifiable to set up programs to reduce it. There's a psychological effect on income disparity, and though I won't get into it here it does beget an interesting discussion. How about homosexuality? Of course once we can get past the highly ignorant and depressing discussion of whether it's a "choice" or not, we can try to understand why homosexuality developed in species. And hopefully it can render the contemporary discussion of whether being gay is "right" or "wrong" as obsolete. And this goes for many other things as we come to terms with human nature. Remember, most of our modern evolutionary history and ancestry took place tens of thousands of years before any recorded history. Our modern society is only a small speck of time and many of our "crazy" or "irrational" behaviors can only be understood by the aforementioned time period of human evolution. My suggestion: buy the book. It's a must-read.
Dr. Wright covers most, if not all, of the major topics into which evolutionary psychology has delved over the past several decades, including application of gene selectionism and evolutionary theory to explain social phenomena, altruism, the behavioral and psychological differences between males and females, human sexuality and sexual market value of men and women, monogamy versus polygamy and polygyny and the role of each in human marriage and reproduction, marriage in general, the adaptive purpose of varying family structures, the origins and function of social status, and the role of deception and self-deception in maximizing social cohesion. The author refers to a healthy diversity of conclusions from the work of such men as John Maynard Smith, E.O. Wilson, Robert Trivers, Robert Axelrod, and others, and explains the historical and ideological significance of these men's contributions. Furthermore, Wright exemplifies his claims often by referring back to the life and times of Charles Darwin, showing how principles of evolutionary psychology manifested in Darwin's social behavior (e.g., his marriage with his wife). This, I feel, substantially contributed to the entertainment value of the book.
I do not quite award this book five stars on the grounds that the last few chapters, concerning "the moral of the story" of evolutionary psychology, are of dubious quality. The author fails to clearly articulate why he considers evolutionary psychology as any more relevant to morality than other biological and social sciences – thus casting into doubt the legitimacy of titling his work "The Moral Animal." Perhaps it does, but the author does not succeed in making the case.
In one chapter especially, he explicitly subscribes to utilitarianism. Although the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and the two Mills was a step forward in moral philosophy, and indeed probably made correct moral assessments 90% of the time, its defect was in regarding attainment of the greatest good as the central feature of morality, instead of classifying it as an important but inferior, secondary consideration after the more important feature of avoidance of the greatest harm. The 10% failure rate of utilitarianism in arriving at correct moral judgments becomes apparent when one considers that frequently the greatest good cannot be attained in a way any rational, impartial person would consider morally acceptable (for example, if a sufficient number of men gang-rape a woman, a consistent utilitarian would have to regard the act as morally acceptable on the grounds that gains of the perpetrators outweigh the loss of the victim). I would not cite endorsement of incorrect moral theory as reason to lessen my evaluation of a book on evolutionary psychology, except the author, as I have said, made it his intent to tie morality with evolutionary psychology, an aim at which, again, I claim he failed. For example, he might explain how evolutionary psychology fills the is-ought gap, and though he tries, he only partially demonstrates how evolutionary psychology does, in fact, do this (and contrary to many, the is-ought gap can be and has been closed by moral philosophers; see, for example, Bernard Gert's _Morality_ and Michael Huemer's _Ethical Intuitionism_.)
Another defect I would note in these chapters, and again relevant to morality, is the author's endorsement of pure determinism, and therefore, the idea that free will is an illusion. Perhaps this is a correct view or perhaps it isn't; though I tend to err on the side of some form of free will actually existing (though we are less capable of controlling our actions than we typically believe), my general reading so far of the opposing views on the free will debate is that neither side argues its case very effectively. And I don't think Wright – who contests the existence of free will with a specifically biochemical application of deterministic thought – argues his case effectively, or at least sufficiently, either. First, like the ancient Stoics, he attempts to reconcile preordained outcomes with moral responsibility and fails (as he only ever could have, as the two claims rest on opposing sides of a contradiction). Second of all, he somewhat begs the question with regard to determinism. Like Sam Harris and company on this issue, he claims that causal determinism necessitates preordinance of all future occurrences, and in doing so, posits the strawman claim that people who believe in free will reject causality. I don't think the majority of free will theorists claim absence of causality; what they typically do is infer from an irreducibly probabilistic account of physics the conclusion that, although all effects arise from prior causes, causes have more than one possible effect. I'm not an expert in physics, so perhaps such an account is wrong; however, if it is wrong and Wright believes it to be wrong, he should explain himself further than simply appealing to biochemical causality as somehow, by itself, necessitating pure determinism. (And doing so would require extending his analysis to a more fundamental level than that of biochemistry: specifically, the level of physics. If pure determinism is true, then it must be explained at the level of physics before that of chemistry and biology, since higher levels of chemistry and biology are constructed on top of physics and cannot violate physics.)
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We all have intuitive ideas about why we are the way we are: nationality, colour, parental influence, peer pressure, culture, and so on, all partly determine our identity. One fact beyond intuition, however, is the rather longer timescale over which evolution has shaped both our bodies and our brains. Just as the circumstances of a childhood can affect a whole life, so too does the ancestral environment we grew up in as a species continue to make itself felt. That it does so in ways which are largely hidden from conscious view only serves to point up the importance of evolutionary psychology. We should not make the mistake of comparing the sparsely populated open savannah with the bustling cities many of us now live in and concluding that our evolutionary history has no relevance. We are remarkably flexible in many ways, but we are most certainly not blank slates. Human nature is a collaborative project in which we are often the junior partners who cannot edit the words of long-dead senior scriptwriters.
There are many adaptations that have outlived their logic, but which still affect our behaviour. An example is the sweet tooth. "Our fondness for sweetness was designed for an environment in which fruit existed but candy didn't." (Any sensible person reading this will immediately provide their own scare quotes around that word "designed", as Wright himself does elsewhere. Natural selection works as if "it were consciously designing organisms" to behave in a certain way. There is no designer, of course, nor any plan or purpose.) We may want to be slim but natural selection "demands" that we cram in as many calories as we can to stave off the Malthusian extinction that was a constant threat to our ancestors.
Personal happiness is often taken to be a natural desire. Its pursuit has even been written into a political constitution. However, natural selection doesn't "want" us to be happy, it "wants" us to be genetically prolific, and those two goals are uncomfortable bedfellows. We are each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth: "My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death." Fortunately for us lumbering collections of replicators, we share some of this precious material with others, so this bleak doctrine of the selfish gene is also capable of generating cooperative behaviour, such as reciprocal altruism. The simple strategy of tit for tat - "do unto others as they've done unto you" - models how this could have evolved.
Rigid behavioural responses have a limited usefulness, especially in a social environment that can change more rapidly than the physical one. People don't always repay kindness with kindness, but sometimes lie, cheat or steal - and prosper as a result. Remember, if you can get more of your genes into the next generation by behaving badly, that's what natural selection "wants" you to do. Those on the receiving end have other ideas, of course, as do their genes, and natural selection will "help" them too if they can come up with a way of reducing the payoff from lying, cheating and stealing, that is, if they can modify the social environment so that such behaviours are discouraged. Hence feelings like guilt evolved, perhaps first gaining a foothold through kin selection, which encourages us to look out for siblings and to feel bad if we don't.
A family of related individuals is part of a broader society, and both are held together by varying amounts of the various "ingredients of morality, from empathy to guilt". Evolutionary psychology explains "the adaptive value of a malleable conscience" and points to its "firm genetic basis". The seeming paradox of flexibility built on fixed genetic foundations can be dissolved by thinking of human nature as consisting "of knobs and of mechanisms for tuning the knobs", where the tuning depends on the particular social environment encountered.
Paradox is one thing, controversy another. Given the long struggle to achieve political and legal equality between men and women (rights still not recognized in some parts of the world), it's hardly surprising that some took umbrage at the idea that, for example, "male and female jealousy should differ". We all accept there are obvious physical differences between men and women, but there is also an equally obvious behavioural difference: while men "can reproduce hundreds of times a year, assuming they can persuade enough women to cooperate", women "can't reproduce more often than once a year". When it comes to maximizing their genetic legacy, men and women have different agendas, not as a result of culture or conditioning but because of "the scarceness of eggs relative to sperm". Much of human sexual psychology flows from this biological fact, including the Darwinian perils of cuckoldry for a man and desertion for a woman.
"The new Darwinian synthesis is, like quantum physics or molecular biology, a body of scientific theory and fact; but, unlike them, it is also a way of seeing everyday life." This is a source of excitement to some and anxiety to others. In intellectual terms, it is reassuring that Wright is quite happy to describe some elements of the theory as speculative, supported only by circumstantial evidence. In terms of social policy, we should not despair that human nature relies in part on largely fixed and selfish genes, because "the most radical differences among people are the ones most likely to be traceable to environment" - and this is something we can influence.
Religion has long monopolized ethics, with disastrous results. Even one small sect of one religion after five hundred years cannot decide whether women bishops are a good or a bad thing, and yet they still claim to provide moral leadership. The scientific study of our moral nature holds out far more hope, both in practical terms of informing policy but also as an awe-inspiring insight into the "deeper unity within the species". Perhaps most hopeful of all, and most surprising to find in a book of science, is one of Robert Wright's conclusions, "that the new paradigm will tend to lead the thinking person toward love and away from hate".
Evolutionary Biology (inc psychology/human behaviour ) has had many historic landmark discoveries (many of which are cited throughout this book) that have shone a scientific light on one of the most significant human social questions "Why We Are The Way We Are"?. Anyone (desiring to learn fact based information) whom reads this book with a questioning (critical) mind, that's capable of taking into consideration information that's founded on sound methodical research will find out that Evolutionary Psychology says much about human behaviour.Some of this behaviour many already sense at some level ("Folk wisdom" ,but socially/culturally are inclined not to say due to the social costs occured from those whom are easily offended by anything which contradicts their central premise.e.g. "deeply" held emotionally based beliefs). This book also contains information that nobody whom doesn't study the Evolutionary Psychology/Biology research can be aware of (The deeper physiology that ultimately emerges, as feelings, that motivate humans to behave and think (or think and then behave) one way or another.
So what’s it worth to better understand yourself and understand/ predict the behaviours/spoken words of those around you?. That depends on the context of the environment you find yourself in and what your objectives are. If your in a mental health profession (objective = health), evolutionary psychology can help alleviate those whom suffer irrational fears. If your a marketing sales person (objective =sales) evolutionary psychology can help companies to sell products using more ethically based advertising (e,g, Healthy food advertising aimed at kids to help get them started on the right track). If your in politics (and hopefully have a generally good ethical character because good ethical people voted for you), evolutionary psychology can help to form evidenced based policies that deliver rewarding social results that increase social equality & provide equal opportunity (a level “playing” field not based on unjustified discrimination).
In summary:
The Book, ‘The Moral Animal’ is another great addition to the science based books genre (though much research has been published since), written in such a way that the layperson can get a “feeling” (comprehension) of the scientific consensus of that topic. If you want to effectively learn chemistry there is no other way than to learn some basic concept of Atoms. If you want to effectively learn what and why humans are the way they are, there is no better way than the science based information of Evolutionary Psychology/ Biology.
Natural + Sexual selection + genetic drift /Time= All life on Earth (& potentially some Life off Earth).









