ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
vast experience as a field researcher with primates (working, for example, with Jane
Goodall) and from his research on Pleistocene-like contemporary foragers, Boehm
concludes that small bands of people pressured others to act generously for the sake of
group cohesion and cooperation. The book is captivating in its strong narrative voice,
its compelling stories from the field, and its scholarly grounding.
This is a handsomely-produced book, with a typeface/font that is very easy to read.
There are twelve chapters (and an epilogue), as follows: “Darwin’s Inner Voice”;
“Living the Virtuous Life”; “Of Altruism and Free Riders”; “Knowing Our Immediate
Predecessors”; “Resurrecting Some Venerable Ancestors”; “A Natural Garden of
Eden”; “The Positive Side of Social Selection”; “Learning Morals Across the
Generations”; “Work of the Moral Majority”; “Pleistocene Ups, Downs, and
Crashes”; “Testing the Selection-by-Reputation Hypothesis”; “The Evolution of
Morals”; “Humanity’s Moral Future.” Numerous sub-headings within each chapter
make for easy navigation. There is an extensive bibliography and a thorough index.
The dust jacket of the book features images of a coiled snake and a red apple, symbols
of Eden, and as Boehm points out (not apparent in the Book of Genesis), the Garden
of Eden would have been a dangerous place. Christopher Boehm is also the author of:
Hierarchy in the Forest; Blood Revenge; and Montenegrin Social Organization and
Values (as well as many articles). Boehm is Director of the Jane Goodall Research
Center and Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at the University of
Southern California.
This is an important book and essential reading for anyone in a field that intersects
with evolutionary studies. However, even as Boehm admits, there is no single book or
theory that will answer the conundrum about the origins of human morality. This
review, therefore, complements the review (in these pages) of Dennis Krebs, The
Origins of Morality: An Evolutionary Account – it is recommended that both these
recent books be read (nearly side-by-side), as each one helps fill in the complex
picture concerning the genesis of human morals. Aside from their different
approaches to charting the birth of moral systems, both Krebs and Boehm give voice
to an exclusively evolutionary reading of human morality. And from these books, one
can work backwards through the literature on this subject that started in earnest with
Darwin (The Descent of Man). In our pre-history (ancestral human species) and from
the DNA level, the selfish-gene model is attractive; from the perspective of more
recent history (the emergence of Homo sapiens) and epigenetics or culture, the group
model is attractive.
While he draws from some of the leaders in this field (Trivers and Alexander), Boehm
places emphasis on a social (and not selfish or kin) model, in fact often invoking
Émile Durkheim’s name. There is very little discussion of Hamilton, some reference
to Axelrod, and counter arguments to Williams (the last of whom argues that altruism
evolved between individuals and is not a group product). Books by Matt Ridley,
Robert Wright, and Marc Hauser are criticized for neglecting evolutionary history,
which might not be wholly accurate (since quite often they bring into their discussions
evolution and the prehistory of humankind). However, Boehm takes pains (in the
tradition of &