Al Owski’s Reviews > The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion > Status Update

“Darwin believed that morality was an adaptation that evolved by natural selection operating at the individual level and at the group level. Tribes with more virtuous members replaced tribes with more selfish members.”

“If genetic evolution was able to fine-tune our bones, teeth, skin, and metabolism in just a few thousand years as our diets and climates changed, how could genetic evolution not have tinkered with our brains and behaviors as our social environments underwent the most radical transformation in primate history?”

“The coevolution of tribal minds and tribal cultures didn't just prepare us for war; it also prepared us for far more peaceful coexistence within our groups, and, in modern times, for cooperation on a vast scale as well.”

“These tribal instincts are a kind of overlay, a set of groupish emotions and mental mechanisms laid down over our older and more selfish primate nature. It may sound depressing to think that our righteous minds are basically tribal minds, but consider the alternative. Our tribal minds make it easy to divide us, but without our long period of tribal living there'd be nothing to divide in the first place.”

“In such proto-tribal societies, individuals who found it harder to play along, to restrain their antisocial impulses, and to conform to the most important collective norms would not have been anyone's top choice when it came time to choose partners for hunting, foraging, or mating. In particular, people who were violent would have been shunned, punished, or in extreme cases killed.”

“gene-culture coevolution…the ability to digest lactose is lost during childhood. The gene that makes lactase (the enzyme that breaks down lactose) shuts off after a few years of service, because mammals don't drink milk after they are weaned. But those first cattle keepers…had a vast new supply of fresh milk… Any individual whose mutated genes delayed the shutdown of lactase production had advantage.”

“Homo heidelbergensis is…our best candidate for Rubicon crosser. These people had cumulative culture, teamwork, and a division of labor, … shared intentionality, including at least some rudimentary moral matrix that helped them work together and then share the fruits of their labor. By crossing over, they transformed not just the course of human evolution but the very nature of the evolutionary process.”

“Many people assume that language was our Rubicon, but language became possible only after our ancestors got shared intentionality. Tomasello notes that a word is not a relationship between a sound and an object. It is an agreement among people who share a joint representation of the things in their world, and who share a set of conventions for communicating with each other about those things.”

“In contrast, when early humans began to share intentions, their ability to hunt, gather, raise children, and raid their neighbors increased exponentially. Everyone on the team now had a mental representation of the task, knew that his or her partners shared the same representation, knew when a partner had acted in a way that impeded success or that hogged the spoils, and reacted negatively to such violations.”

“According to Tomasello, human cognition veered away from that of other primates when our ancestors developed shared intentionality. At some point in the last million years, a small group of our ancestors developed the ability to share mental representations of tasks that two or more of them were pursuing together. ”