How Executions Made Us (More) Human
How exactly do rules "regulate" behavior?
What role has the death penalty played in human evolution and history? A decisive one, at least according to primatologist and anthropologist Richard Wrangham who wrote a book about it1.
According to Wrangham, our groupishness, or a "set of psychological tendencies to cooperate and be prosocial towards other members of the group in a way that often—at first glance—appears to transcend one's own genetic interest," evolved as an accidental byproduct of social dynamics among males. Other primates do not form groups in the same way humans do—they lack feelings of fairness and sacrifice for the good of the group.
Groupishness developed with the appearance of Homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago through a process of self-domestication. Unlike domestication where one species reduces the reactive aggression of another species, the human species did this to itself—we domesticated ourselves—by eliminating “alpha males”.
Reactive or impulsive aggression is an immediate aggressive response to a challenge or threat. Compared to other primates, H. sapiens have low rates of reactive aggression.
People exhibit what's known as the domestication syndrome, or signals of reduced reactive aggression. Compared to other members of the genus Homo, we display four main characteristics of a domesticated species: lighter bodies, shorter faces and smaller teeth, feminization of the skull and skeleton, and a reduction in brain size (10-15% over the last 30,000 years).
Similar signals can be observed in animals that humans have domesticated. Dogs, for example, have white spots on their heads and paws or floppy ears, non-aggressive traits that evoke nurturing and caregiving instincts in us.
Neanderthals (and Denisovans), Homo heidelbergensis, and earlier ancestors, on the other hand, do not exhibit the domestication syndrome but have "aggressive anatomy" (robust bodies, large and broad faces, pronounced sexual dimorphism).
Additionally, genes for domestication have so far been found only in H. sapiens, not in Neanderthals and Denisovans. According to Wrangham, this suggests selection against reactive aggression.
(Another similar hypothesis is that the introduction of the death penalty—state monopoly on violence that is— pacified Western Europe in recent history.)
Sometimes leaders of human groups are referred to as “alpha males,” but they are far from being “alphas” in the primatological sense of the word. In human societies, at the top of the dominance hierarchy are actually alliances, and leaders manage the alliance through consensus (or at least some form of majority consent), rather than through personal physical violence. When a leader becomes too despotic, if they start physically assaulting others, for example, the alliance removes them.
Anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls this the reverse dominance hierarchy, where even the leader is dominated by the alliance.
Furthermore, ethnographic evidence supports the universality of execution: for example, all recorded hunter-gatherer societies have community-sanctioned killing of a community member. In societies without prisons, execution is the only ultimate method of controlling alphas in the group.
While within-group killings occur among chimpanzees, there are no executions, meaning there is no evidence that chimpanzees can plan and cooperate to carry out a prearranged act of killing a group member. Most within-group killings among chimpanzees target lower or middle-ranking members of the group, not alphas.
Executions are thus a specifically human form of coordinated, conspiratorial, group-sanctioned removal of usually violent and selfish group members. Our linguistic ability, which is lacking in other species, helps us in reaching agreement and coordination.
Although as a species we have reduced our propensity for impulsive aggression over time, we have improved this other, more calculated and cold form of group and coordinated aggression, as manifested in wars.
According to Wrangham, besides reducing reactive aggression within the population, executions also explain conformity. Since by executing members who violate the group's norms, the community eliminates those individuals who disrupt its norms, execution also has an effect on aligning behavior with the community's rules.
Three Ways Rules Can Exert an Influence
This last idea is interesting when we consider how rules exert their influence on human behavior. The most common way of understanding this influence is that people internalize and follow rules that are transmitted or imposed on them through socialization, often or typically under the threat of sanctions.
However, besides the aforementioned, there are other, insufficiently appreciated ways in which rules can be causally relevant.
Firstly, certain rules may attract those people who are capable and willing to adhere to them. In these cases, saying that rules “regulate” or “govern” their behavior seems like an overstatement.
To what extent do rules regulate/govern behavior as opposed to simply attracting those who are willing and capable of submitting to them?
Is political and moral behavior determined by following certain political and moral principles, or do people choose political/moral principles that are more in line with their existing behavioral inclinations?
Hard questions to be sure.
The second, insufficiently appreciated, way in which rules can influence human behavior is by changing the biological fitness of those who (do not) adhere to them. If the community punishes individuals who violate norms in a way that this punishment results in a reduced number of offspring they leave, over time there will be more regularity in behavior within the population even though this regularity is not a product of internalizing and following rules!
This raises an interesting question: to what extent is our social order, morality, and cooperation the result of people internalizing rules they learned from others and then applying them in practice vs the result of changing the biological fitness of those people who (do not) adhere to the rules?
Suppose we encounter a successful community of people. We want to emulate them to become successful ourselves. We notice that their behavior can be described by certain rules (perhaps they themselves have written down these rules as “laws”). Whether it makes sense to adopt these rules depends on whether the behavior of that group of people is the product of following those rules or not. This is because it is possible that the rules only describe the regularity in the behavior of those people without having an actual causal role in producing that behavior.2
The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence
Wrangham's theory about the role of executions in human evolution implies that the historical relationship between virtue and vice is somewhat more complicated and unusual than one may typically think.
Accepting the possibility of the existence of that "strange relationship between virtue and violence," as he puts it in the title of his book, would mean becoming a thinker of that “dangerous Perhaps” famously expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche in his own distinctive way:
HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? or the Will to Truth out of the will to deception? or the generous deed out of selfishness? or the pure sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness? Such genesis is impossible; whoever dreams of it is a fool, nay, worse than a fool; things of the highest value must have a different origin, an origin of THEIR own — in this transitory, seductive, illusory, paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity, they cannot have their source. But rather in the lap of Being, in the intransitory, in the concealed God, in the ‘Thing-in-itself — THERE must be their source, and nowhere else!” — This mode of reasoning discloses the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians of all times can be recognized, this mode of valuation is at the back of all their logical procedure; through this “belief” of theirs, they exert themselves for their “knowledge,” for something that is in the end solemnly christened “the Truth.”
The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is THE BELIEF IN ANTITHESES OF VALUES. It never occurred even to the wariest of them to doubt here on the very threshold (where doubt, however, was most necessary); though they had made a solemn vow, “DE OMNIBUS DUBITANDUM.” For it may be doubted, firstly, whether antitheses exist at all; and secondly, whether the popular valuations and antitheses of value upon which metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps merely superficial estimates, merely provisional perspectives, besides being probably made from some corner, perhaps from below — “frog perspectives,” as it were, to borrow an expression current among painters.
In spite of all the value which may belong to the true, the positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things — perhaps even in being essentially identical with them.
Perhaps! But who wishes to concern himself with such dangerous “Perhapses”! For that investigation one must await the advent of a new order of philosophers, such as will have other tastes and inclinations, the reverse of those hitherto prevalent — philosophers of the dangerous “Perhaps” in every sense of the term. And to speak in all seriousness, I see such new philosophers beginning to appear.
His previous book, to which I allude in the title of this piece, explored how cooking “made us human”.
More precisely: the causal role of rule may consist in the fact that following or violating the rules results in differential reproduction over time.