On Human Nature

• Author: Craig Jones
• Pages: 51-69

51

PART 2

On Human Nature

The Devil Inside

What possessed Harold Blackmore and his wife to marry a third and

adopt the polygamous lifestyle, enduring the excommunication and

ostracization that would inevitably follow?

e simplistic explanation would be that Harold, Gwen, a nd Florence

were led to polygamy through devotion to their religion. But let me sug-

gest to you that such an explanation might be putting the cart before

the horse. What if the religion simply provided an environment — a pre-

text — in which an unusual but natural human mating behaviour could

become manifest? Fundamentalist Mormons did not invent polygamy;

they simply, for a brief period of time, resurrected it in the middle of

an overwhelmingly monogamous social environment. In this context it is

interesting that almost every advocate of faith-based polygamy presents it

as not only a religious imperative, but also in some way a natural human

family structure. Is it? And if so, does it matter?

One of the riskier, or at least more controversial, aspects of the Attor-

ney General’s case in the reference would be our invocation of evolutionary

principles to explain the phenomenon of polygyny and its establishment as

the overwhelmingly domina nt form of polygamy. Equ ally fascinating is the

question of whether the competing mating model — monogamy — could

also have evolved, and how. e overall theory of the Attorney General

was a cultural and cognitive co-evolution — that is, the combination of

evolved behaviours and social st ructures that succeeded or failed based on

their ability to survive as genes or as ideas through the generations.

e starting point is the relatively new eld of evolutionary psych-

ology — the application of Darwinian principles to patterns of human

behaviour, instead of simply to physical attributes. David Buss, a pioneer

in the eld of evolutionary psychology, explains it as “a hybrid discipline

that draws insights from modern evolutionary theory, biology, cognitive

A Cruel Arit hmetic: Inside the Case Against Polygamy

52

psychology, anthropology, economics, computer science, and paleoarchae-

ology.” e gist of it is that behaviour has evolved through selection over

deep evolutionary time, and that “[h]uman psychology consists of a large

number of functionally specia lized evolved mechanisms, each sensitive to

particula r forms of contextual input, that get combined, coordinated, and

integrated with each other to produce manifest behavior.”

at specic behaviours — not just more generalized cognitive sys-

tems — evolve in tandem with more physically apparent features is a fact

we easily accept when we are discussing any other species. If a particular

breed of nch feeds o insects plucked from holes in trees, it would be

unsurprising that it has evolved both a long bea k and a tendency to search

for food in holes.

e diculty comes with the application of evolutionary principles

of behaviour in the context of human societies. Ideas of “human nature”

are easily exploited in the service of all manner of prejudices to the point

where suggestions that human behaviours a re innate are almost automatic-

ally oensive because they suggest immutability and therefore a futil ity in

the progressive will to alter behaviour through social change. Evolution-

ary psychology, then, is seen by many as a capitu lation to human nature, a

denial of free wil l, and a surrender of our responsibility to improve society.

To look at it a slightly dierent way, our social order, from religions to

behavioural norms to laws, is premised on our will to impose standards

of behaviour on others, even where that behaviour has no eect on us.

Humans are unique in that norm-enforcing characteristic. And those

most inclined to design rules for others (with the best of intentions, of

course) believe that their project is undermined by suggestions that there

may be real, innate, and immutable barriers to social manipulation.

is is a particularly thorny idea where the suggestion is that there

are evolved and more or less innate dierences between dierent groups

of people. Dierences asserted to have evolved among the races, making

some smarter or more creative or lazier than others seemed thoroughly de-

bunked by Stephen Jay Gould in e Mismeasure of Man, only to resurface

again in the debate that surrounded t he publication in 1994 of Herrnstein

and Murray’s e Bell Curve.

e debate over the social implications of evolutionary theory followed

very quickly in the wake of Darwin’s Beagle. In the Victorian era and be-

yond, “natural selection” was cheerfully recruited by imperial apologists

as not only explaining, but justifying the subjugation of the world by the

most advanced few. e success of one group over another was deemed to

be foreordained, ipso facto proof of genetic superiority. e theme will be

immediately recognizable to students of the philosophies of Nietzsche or

the rhetoric of Nazism.