The Struggle for Survival

Most conservatives believe the sociological view of aggression is naïve. The theory of evolution shows us that animals only survive that are fit for the struggle. They urge us to admit that humans have a basic desire to harm other people – just as important as other basic drives like hunger. This podcast considers three arguments for this perspective and shows why they are mistaken. 

Transcript

Chapter 3: The struggle for survival?
Terry Leahy 2024

So, what I've been arguing so far is that sociologists do not believe that an urge to kill is a basic drive in human beings. To compete aggressively to the point of doing physical harm to other people. On the other hand, sociologists do tend to accept that a capacity to use aggression is innate. As a tool used to serve other basic drives. And clearly one of the problems with that sociological analysis is the record of excessive aggression throughout our history. An excess that does not fit that theory. Aggression pursued pretty much for its own sake. That is probably why evolutionary psychologists have decided that there's an urge to kill. That hypothesis might explain aggression that goes beyond the necessity to use aggression to meet other needs.  
So this chapter takes on the arguments of evolutionary psychologists. The evolutionary psychology view is that aggressive competition is driven by our human nature, and that evolution is responsible for creating this aggressive drive. The competitive evolutionary pressure for survival of the fittest creates this need for violence. And once we understand how evolution works, we won't find any of this excessive aggression surprising.
You could call this chapter ‘lobster salad’ in honour of Jordan Peterson, a recent and extremely popular social psychologist. One of his great examples is a lobster in a cave underwater, who must defend their turf against other lobster attacks. So, evolution has provided them with the drives that are necessary for extreme aggression. The book's mostly written for men. So, he recommends to his readers that they stand up for themselves and recognize their aggressive desires as their evolutionary inheritance. They need to remember that they would never have arrived on the planet if their ancestors had not developed these aggressive desires through evolutionary competition.  
To get started, I am absolutely in favour of people standing up for themselves. There is no doubt that evolution has primed us to be able to do that. It is no surprise that we want to look after our own interests. But I would also note that Jordan Peterson is talking to a readership of men who have few problems standing up for themselves. Instead, they rush about the world in a state of perpetual grumpiness. Looking for excuses to get into a fight.  Like the man tail gating you because you have the temerity to be travelling at the speed limit and not 10 kph above it. Or the man who rides his bike at an insane pace through an off-lead dog park and runs into your dog. I mean, excuse me. These people don't need to be told how to stand up for themselves. 
What’s worse, these manopshere devotees exercise their aggression against people who are not the real cause of their troubles. Like the dog who’s not doing them any harm. It is probably a bit unfair to blame the manosphere alone. As sociologists of masculinity (Raewyn Connell) and of the manosphere and the far right, (Pamela Nilan and Arlie Hochschild), point out, a sense of frustration and anger is not that surprising for men who have little power in their day to day lives and are constantly frustrated by circumstance.  For working class men in the rich countries, the typical channels through which their fathers gained status have been blocked. Neoliberalism and globalisation have destroyed job security and the option of buying a house. It has become impossible to live out the esteemed role of the breadwinner. The feelings that go with this have been called ‘aggrieved entitlement’. The far right and the manosphere provide avenues through which to combat this humiliating reduction in circumstances. By scapegoating selected others. Women, refugees, queer and trans, the Indigenous, blacks on welfare. Random strangers. The woke left. The Jewish conspiracy. And so on.
This manosphere advice, distilled from evolutionary psychology, closes off avenues for human contact and closeness. Everyone is a potential enemy. It may be a part of human nature to want what you want and stand up for yourself. But it's also a part of human nature to enjoy looking after other people. 
So let me move on from the personal attacks to a more analytic critique of the arguments of evolutionary psychology. There are three basic arguments. The first is that to survive in a competitive environment – life on earth – evolution must fit you with a basic desire for aggression. Their second argument tackles the sociological position more directly. There is no real-world empirical difference between the view that aggression is a basic desire of human nature (their view) and the sociological view that aggression is a capacity that has evolved to assist us in conflicts with other people. So, the simpler and more elegant explanation of aggression is that we have a basic desire to be aggressive.  Their third argument is to compare humans to other species that are our close relatives. If aggressive behaviour is common in these species, it must be part of their nature. We cannot explain it by socialisation. So, the most likely explanation of human aggression is not that we are socialized to be aggressive. It is in our nature. 
Survival of the fittest. 
According to evolutionary psychologists, to survive and pass on their genes, members of a species need to be competitive. The way the world is, there can be a scarcity of food, nest sites, mates. To grab these scarce resources and survive, you must be aggressive and prepared to fight the other animals/humans going after them. Consequently, using the words of Tiger and Fox’s Imperial Animal, human nature includes the pursuit of unfair shares. It must be human nature to try and get more for yourself than other people are getting. 
My reply begins by acknowledging the first step of their argument. There must be an evolutionary advantage in being able to compete when your interests are threatened. But their conclusion – that there is a generalised desire to harm others – does not follow. When your interests are not threatened, it makes more good sense to cooperate. If a generalized desire for violence was indeed part of human nature it would just get in the way when we are better off cooperating. 
Social animals prosper by helping others. One of the examples cited in this debate looks at how chimpanzees behave when they find a big tree full of ripe fruit. They do not sit there munching away quietly, ensuring that they will get the biggest share. No, they scream and shout, encouraging other chimpanzees to come from near and far to enjoy the feast.
Social psychologists love to clinch an argument with a controlled experiment. Abstracting from real life to provide valid statistical comparisons across a range of occasions, constructed to be similar. In this field, Robert Axelrod is well known for using a ‘prisoners’ dilemma’ game to demonstrate that there is an evolutionary advantage in being cooperative, rather than competitive. Peter Singer, a philosopher of ethics, explains the argument.
Axelrod begins with the classic prisoner’s dilemma game. The original form of the game is designed to show there is no payoff in altruism — and consequently that evolution must favour selfishness. 
In the game, two prisoners from a gang have committed a crime. They are in prison and cannot communicate. The police need further evidence, so they provide an inducement to each prisoner to confess and by doing that dob in the other prisoner. If one confesses and the other remains silent (refusing to dob in their fellow prisoner), then the one who confesses gets no gaol sentence and the one who refuses to dob gets three years. If they both remain silent, they both get one year. If they both confess, they get a two-year stretch. The temptation for each prisoner is to confess and avoid a gaol sentence altogether — if the other prisoner remains silent. In other words, not to cooperate with their fellow gang member. Or to avoid getting a three-year sentence if the other prisoner confesses. To take the selfish option. 
For a game that only lasts one turn, it makes sense to choose the nasty option and increase your own chances of doing well. Because if they are nasty and you are nice, you do worse than them in the game. 
Let’s spell this out from the point of view of one of the prisoners (ego). 
Option A: I stay shtum (cooperate with the other prisoner). I get one year if the other prisoner also stays shtum (cooperates). I get three years if the other prisoner confesses (dobs – the nasty option). In other words, my average probable sentence is two years. Not good. 
Option B: However, if I confess (dob, the nasty option) I get no years at all if the other prisoner stays shtum (cooperates, the nice option). I get two years if the other prisoner also confesses (dobs, the nasty option). The average probable sentence is one year. 
The point of the game is that from a selfish point of view, it makes no sense to cooperate (stay shtum). You are more likely to get a longer sentence. So, if evolution favours those who maximize their own chances of success, it will never select those who are altruistic. 
Axelrod’s experiment was to repeat this game with the same players and to see what strategy was most successful over the long haul. Because the players get to know each other and can predict what the other player is likely to do, a different set of choices makes sense. 
Let’s look at how things work out if both prisoners keep choosing the nice option – staying shtum. They both can reliably expect a one-year sentence. Neither of them is in danger of getting a three-year sentence. Or a two-year sentence. But they give up the chance of getting no years at all. So, over the long haul, in a case where you can begin to trust the moves of the other player, it makes sense to employ a cooperative strategy. Forgoing options that would damage the other player and let you off the hook entirely. 
Axelrod set up the game so that two players played the game with each other for 200 turns. Trying this strategy with different pairs of players, Axelrod worked out the strategy that had the most chance of favouring a player, leading to the highest scores in the total of 200 cases. 
The best strategy is what he called the tit for tat strategy. In the tit for tat strategy, you cooperate on the first move, you are unselfish. You have no idea what this person is going to do so the most sensible first move is to cooperate. You hope that they will cooperate on their move, the response. If they are cooperative on that move, you cooperate back. You do not undermine this pattern by tricking them and making a nasty move, so long as they are cooperating. But as well, the Tit for Tat strategy advises you to respond to a nasty move on their part by a nasty move in response. Stop cooperating. Punish them for their nasty move. The most amazing thing about the experiment is that this strategy can be implemented at any time in the game. If they have been making nasty moves and suddenly cooperate, you cooperate back. Immediately. If their next move is cooperative too, you reply in kind. 
In other words, if evolution rewards success in relationships with other people, then the tit for tat strategy is the one favoured by evolution. For people living in a group where the likely behaviour of other people in your group is a known fact. Not having a generalized disposition to harm other people — but to have a willingness to harm other people when they are harming you. Otherwise, to be cooperative. 
A similar line of argument has been advanced by other social psychologists who refer to their view as ‘group selection’. They argue that natural selection does not just work on individuals but on groups. As Axelrod’s experiment suggests, people who know each other and can predict the behaviour of their associates do well to adopt a cooperative strategy. David Sloan Wilson works on a similar logic. He maintains that evolutionary pressures work on individuals to reward selfish behaviour but work on groups to reward cooperative behaviour. In other words, a group that comes to have an ‘unselfish’ gene in most people in the group will pass on their genes better than a group that has all selfish people. Because their cooperative behaviour will help them to survive. These two evolutionary pressures work against each other, meaning that the human species is both selfish and cooperative. 
These social psychology simulations try to set up occasions that they say mirror the situation of evolution. Axelrod, Singer and Sloan Wilson end up by showing why cooperative behaviour is in fact a good strategy where other parties are known and trusted. The strange thing about these arguments is that they have real world implications. It is not just about how genes evolved over millennia. But what might work in the real social world now. But incidentally this creates other problems for their position. If cooperative behaviour is such a useful strategy for individuals who live in social groups, why is dominating and aggressive behaviour so common in human history? 
I will take on this task in following chapters. But for now, let me raise an issue with these evolutionary arguments in general, on both sides of this debate. What we see in the real world is a great variety of human behaviour in different times and places. The task of a theory of human nature is to ask what common drives underly these various phenomena. In an evolutionary psychology analysis, this is to be done by showing what must be the basic drives of human nature — if we also believe the Darwinian theory of the origin of species. The claim is that no theory of human nature can contradict the evolutionary theory of natural selection. It is the theory of evolution that has priority. Nothing else can explain the origin of species so it must be true.
The problem with this strategy is that it can be a bit ad hoc. You work out what you think may be a consequence of natural selection for human nature. You then select from the great variety of behaviour seen in the world to come up with empirical cases that fit with your reading of the implications of natural selection. However, these function merely as illustrations. From the perspective of sociology, anthropology or history this is very topsy turvy. From these perspectives you would start out by looking at human behaviour in all these different contexts and try to come up with the simplest and most elegant theory of human nature that fits this empirical evidence. Only after that had been done would you wonder how this nature might have been produced by natural selection. 
Occam’s razor
The term ‘Occam’s razor’ is used to evaluate theories in science. If two theories fit the empirical evidence equally and one of these theories is unnecessarily complicated, then drop the complicated theory and adopt the simple one. For example, in astronomy, the Ptolemaic theory that the earth was the centre of the universe was backed up by a massively complicated explanation of the observed behaviour of sun, moon, planets and stars. In one way all this worked and fitted with the observations then available. Copernicus developed a different model. The sun was the centre of the solar system, and the earth and other planets orbited around that centre. When he first invented that alternative theory, he used these same observations to back up his different theory. What made Copernicus’s theory superior was the elegant simplicity of his account. 
The use of Occam’s razor permits another common argument against the sociological theory of aggression. The British philosopher, Mary Midgley puts it well. There are no different implications in the real world between the sociological theory and the urge to kill theory. Sociologists say we're only aggressive when we are frustrated by the actions of another person. Yet these situations take place all the time and are inevitable. So, there are no real-world differences between these two theories. We might as well go with the urge to kill theory as the simplest account of what we observe in history. 
This argument does not hold up. The real-world implications of the two theories are quite different. In the sociological view, aggression can be defused by dealing with the problem in another way. In other words, when there's a conflict between people, one response is to use physical aggression or the threat of aggression to get your own way. That's one possibility. The other possibility is that your frustrated need can be satisfied in some other way. You negotiate a solution acceptable to both parties. Or the problem goes away for some other reason. That is a crucial difference between the urge to kill theory and the sociological theory of aggression. On the urge to kill theory it would make no difference if a solution to the conflict was worked out. You would still want to kill someone!
Humans and other apes
The last thing that they talk about is the evidence of other species. Because human beings are natural creatures of the planet, we can look around at other species like us, especially in terms of DNA. We might regard cultural socialisation as something particular to the human species. Something that ends up by being noise where our basic nature is concerned. To drill down and discover our true nature beyond all this noise, let us look at similar species that are less effected by cultural peculiarities. So, lobsters are probably not such a good example, but more typically evolutionary psychologists go to the other ape species ¬— chimpanzees, orangutangs, gorillas, baboons. The social life of these species suggests the central role of aggression and dominance hierarchies, attacks on other groups of the same species. For example, a young male who wants to establish himself in a chimpanzee group will pull off a branch and start bashing the other chimps with the branch. They will hoot loudly, thump their chests and rush about threatening other members of their group. The ones who dominate through these displays go first in mating, get to the food first, get the most comfortable nesting sites. Bands of chimpanzees also attack chimpanzees from other bands who enter their territory. Gorillas live in groups with a senior male ‘silverback’ dominating a small harem of females and young. If another male gorilla wants to take over such a group, he will fight the senior male and kill the infants of the group. Demonstrating that he is to be feared and should be placated. I could go on, there are similar examples from orangutans and baboons, equally disturbing. 
If it is our basic human nature to be like these other ape species, it is no wonder that class societies, dominated by terrifying kings, are so common. That wars between groups are such a regular occurrence. That patriarchal domination, domestic violence and assaults on children are rampant. 
The first thing is this. The best evidence for human nature is what we actually do as humans, not what related species may do. While we certainly do display a lot of these behaviours, there are other behaviours that are quite different. The central difference is that in human groups, aggressive physical dominance does not usually lead to a socially powerful position. Instead, human groups are more likely to control such nasty behaviour and give leadership to people who are cooperative and altruistic. This is very much a matter of history. The greatest time span of human history is the 200,000 years before the advent of cereal agriculture and class society. Our best evidence for what these societies were like is the example of classless societies of the world encountered by Europe in the period of colonisation. What anthropologists call hunter gatherer or horticultural societies. As a great variety of studies indicate, these societies display a combination of patriarchy, and some kinds of competitive male violence — along with cooperative structures of social control. The society as a whole exercises control over people’s actions — not dominating leaders. This social control organizes life in relation to religious or spiritual beliefs that are shared. For example, that members of the turtle descent group should not eat turtle eggs. Decisions are made by consensus, often after days of discussion. Within these groups, no individual male or small elite had the power to command the obedience of others, backed up by the threat of violence — unlike in chimp society. Instead, people with influence were those whose work assisted the group as a whole. For example, someone who invented a new ritual, memorized a song cycle, or assisted the group to come to a decision. 
In other words, our human history fits the demonic ape theory in some ways, but not in other ways. It is not a good fit for the evidence. 
Another approach to this argument is to go back to the examples of ape species and talk about them differently. The argument of the evolutionary psychologists is that these common ape behaviours must come out of an urge to dominate, an urge to kill, a predilection for unfair shares. The sociological view of human nature might interpret these behaviours as essentially strategies — intended to operate in ape groups to secure the satisfaction of other drives. For example, not a desire to dominate using terror and violence but a desire to get the best nesting site in the trees. And so on. There is absolutely nothing in this ape record that does not fit with what humans might do to get what they want — using aggression to secure other ends. For example, men who get their wives to cook the boss’s favourite dinner, to type up their assignments, to offer sex on demand. By shouting at the children in manufactured fits of anger. This is just the human version of the strategy used by male gorillas to take over a gorilla troop. These behaviours are political rather than innate. They rely on knowledge of the likely responses of known other parties.
Studies of animal behaviour reveal the situated nature of these common patterns of ape behaviour. I will describe two interesting examples. One is the chimpanzees that Jane Goodall was studying. They are famous for their aggressive behaviour and for attacking chimpanzees who wandered into their territory from another troop. Their warlike behaviour is a central plank of the perspective of evolutionary psychology. But what people have recently worked out is that Goodall did not notice this aggressive behaviour until she did something that changed the social context for the chimps she was studying. She set up a cage with bananas in it. The favourite food of the chimps. She would let the chimps into the cage to eat the bananas at only at some times of the day. So, the aggressive contestation and outgroup exclusion she witnessed came out of a situation she had created. A situation different from normal life in the forest — where fruit bearing trees ripen in an abundance much too great for any one chimp to monopolize. Suddenly she had created scarcity and a reason to fight other chimps to secure access. Aggression as a tool rather than a basic drive.
The second example is a tribe of baboons who foraged on a dump. The tribe caught tuberculosis and the key males in the tribe all died. Suddenly the female baboons took power. There was much more affiliative behaviour than when the male leadership were in charge of the troop. In the past, the senior males had exercised their domination through attacks on younger male baboons. That all stopped. Applying those lessons to human society, we could probably change human behaviour quite drastically by modifying our social structures. By getting rid of social institutions that make aggression likely. 
The elephant in the room where other ape species are concerned is the bonobo species. A sub-species of chimpanzee that are as close to us in DNA as regular chimps. We split from the chimp and bonobo line four million years ago. It was not till one million years ago that chimps and bonobos split their DNA lineages. In other words, we might have evolved since 4 million years ago in parallel with the evolution of the bonobos. Or not, of course. 
As explained above, ape species in general are male dominated. That is not the case where the bonobos are concerned. Male and female bonobos have equal authority. In fact, groups of older sisters are the most dominant. Male bonobos do not attack females and infants. They do not go on battering displays of rage to get a dominant position. Male infants remain bonded to their mothers as they grow up. Alliances between sisters and their children gang up on any male bonobo that attacks them. 
They have a bi-sexual repertoire, using sex to form friendships and alliances. 
Bonobo troops do not exclude or kill other bonobos entering their territory. They respond to a stranger or another group entering their territory with affection. In fact, the females go up and start having sex with them. While the males look on. Joining in later. 
The fact is that the Bonobos have survived like this for millions of years. Their species has managed with this anti-aggression strategy without any apparent problems. They do not have hierarchical, male dominated social structures, male aggression, hostility between neighbouring groups. None of that. The whole idea that evolution drives a predisposition to kill and dominate is thrown into confusion by this example. Again, what we are up against is the necessity to derive our theory of human nature from the example of human history rather than trying to develop it a priori from a theory of evolution. Selectively culling examples from other species. 
Conclusions
At the end of all this, I am still defending the sociological theory that aggression is a tool of human nature, rather than a basic drive. Nevertheless, the world has seen a lot of excessive violence and competitive aggression. All of this is a bit hard to understand if aggression is just a sensible response — when you are frustrated by what other people are doing. Particularly as class societies for the last 8,000 years have mirrored many of the most distressing aspects of the social life of other ape species. The next few chapters will provide some of the answers to these questions.