Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe

Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe (2009) is a book by Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza that argues for a simple answer to what is variously called the 'human uniqueness question' or ' unanswered question'. "How and why did humans evolve to become so radically different than all other animals." This simple answer is suggested to represent the long-sought theory unifying all the social sciences and joining them to the mature natural sciences.
The authors argue that the simple answer to the human uniqueness question has four elements. First, conflicts of interest between non-kin members of the same species (conspecifics) limit all social cooperation in all animals at all times. Second, humans are the first animals in Earth’s history to control these conflicts of interest. Third, humans are able to control conflicts of interest because the first proto-humans roughly 2 million years ago evolved the capacity to project potentially lethal threat remotely, from a distance of many body diameters away. This capacity for conjoint remote threat renders social coercion adaptive and opens the door to the evolution of a new logic for social behavior, kinship-independent social cooperation. If liars and cheaters can be credibly ostracized, cooperation can emerge as the best available option. Fourth, all uniquely human features, like our elite language, ethical sense and powerful minds, emerge simply from our control of conflicts of interest. Moreover, all the major events of our 2 million year history — like the agricultural revolutions, the rise of the first states and the contemporary emergence of pan-global cooperation — result from the application of the ancient evolved human strategy of coercive enforcement of kinship-independent social cooperation at ever increasing scales, on this theory.
Background
Scientists have long struggled to account for how humans came to leave footprints on the Moon when the pinnacle of non-human animal technical achievement is shaping a simple tool from a stick or stone. Likewise, humans invent the calculus, write symphonies and build enormous social enterprises. Many authors have commented on human uniqueness since Darwin himself in Descent of Man and his contemporaries and immediate followers like Thomas Huxley, Alfred Russell Wallace, Julian Huxley and others. Contemporary commentaries include George C. Williams in Adaptation and Natural Selection; E.O. Wilson in Sociobiology; Richard Dawkins in the final chapter of The Selfish Gene; Dan Dennett in several books including Darwin’s Dangerous Idea; Michael Gazzaniga in The Social Brain; and Richard Alexander in Biology of Moral Systems.
In spite of all this thought and speculation about human uniqueness, no coherent theory of how humans came to be so different from other animals had been previously developed. For example, invoking language or cognitive virtuosity as a cause of human uniqueness can be interpreted to confuse an effect with a cause. Likewise, supposing that group selection on social behavior produced human cooperation and, thus, uniqueness leaves unanswered the question of why group selection produced this effect uniquely in the human lineage. The challenge is to develop a robust, viable answer to the human uniqueness question.
Summary of Topics
Non-Human Social Behavior
In chapters 1-3 in Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe the authors review the well-established evidence that the fundamental logic of evolution by natural selection produces a very specific pattern of social behavior in non-human animals. Non-human animals cooperate predominantly with very close kin. This pattern of social behavior results from kin selection. The mirror image to kin-selected behavior is that non-kin conspecifics actively compete with one another. They behave as if they have conflicts of interest, not merely in the narrow human legalist sense but in a fundamental, universal biological sense. As expected on this picture, non-kin conspecifics occasionally do cooperate with one another, but only under transient, narrow circumstances where they momentarily lack conflicts of interest - like sexual mating.
Revolutionizing the Logic of Social Behavior to Become Human
In Chapter 4 the authors review the extensive evidence that humans cooperate systematically and on a large scale with non-kin and that this cooperation apparently has a specific logic. The vast social and institutional enterprises that humans build are self-evident. The existence and persistence of these institutions requires “law enforcement,” the capacity to ostracize individuals who would otherwise parasitize the cooperative social enterprise.
In Chapter 5 the authors argue that coercive law enforcement is evolutionarily adaptive only in one very specific and unusual circumstance - in an animal that can threaten remotely, project death from a distance. Humans still exploit this logic today, 2 million years into our evolution, when we use gunpowder side arms in law enforcement, the authors note. Humans first evolved this capacity to project threat from a distance when we evolved our unique capacity to throw with great accuracy and extreme violence. Elite throwing is a skill no other animal has ever had. We have inherited this novel ability from our earliest human ancestors as illustrated by American baseball, cricket and in many other contexts.
On this interpretation, all things uniquely human ultimately result from the original ancestral evolution of elite throwing.
Uniquely Human Biology Evolves Very Rapidly After the Evolution of Elite Throwing Roughly 2 Million Years Ago
In Chapter 6 the authors illustrate how complex human developmental biology - including the massive expansion of our brains - can only evolve in an animal that can control conflicts of interest and, thus, cooperate on a greatly enlarged scale. It literally 'takes a (cooperative) village to raise a (human) child'. This insight allows the authors to use the fossil record of human brain expansion to recognize the evolution of uniquely human social cooperation.
In Chapter 7 the authors use the evolution of human skeletal adaptations necessary for elite throwing in order to recognize the evolution of throwing in the fossil remains of our ancient ancestors. The authors argue that the fossil evidence indicates that uniquely human social cooperation evolves very rapidly after the original evolution of elite throwing roughly 2 million years ago. This analysis of the fossil record represents the first strong empirical test of the new theory the authors explore.
Human Language and the Human Mind are the Products of Control of Conflicts of Interest
Non-kin conspecifics have an incentive to actively mislead and manipule one another, sometimes called the 'hostile manipulation problem.' The hostile manipulation problem is just a specific case of the conflict of interest problem. If an animal can realistically ostracize 'liars,' a new logic for information exchange can evolve. Humans are that animal, the authors argue. Non-kin conspecific members of vast human social groups exchange enormous quantities of culturally transmitted information, in contrast to the tiny amounts transmitted by small non-human family groups of very close kin.
In Chapter 9 the authors show how uniquely human language looks like an individual adaptation to this vast human cultural repertoire. In Chapter 10 the authors argue that our uniquely powerful human minds are a direct product of this huge informational heritage. We are so cognitively gifted not as a direct consequence of our genetic evolution. Rather, we are genetically adapted to absorb, use and transmit vast quantities of culturally transmitted information on this view.
Human Sexual Behavior Under Control of Conflicts of Interest
In Chapter 8 the authors argue that uniquely human social cooperation also caused our sexual behavior to evolve in a novel direction. Specifically, ancestral humans evolved to be relatively monogamous under one set of adaptive conditions, conditions resembling most parts of the contemporary developed world. However, ancestral human mating behavior is also expected to have been highly contingent, the authors argue. They suggest that humans are naturally promiscuous within cooperative social units under other adaptive conditions, conditions very different than most parts of the contemporary world. They review extensive ethnographic evidence for this unexpected conclusion. The authors suggest that contemporary human sexual minds and bodies have been shaped by this complex, contingent past.
A Theory of History is Predicted by the New Theory of Human Uniqueness
Human history has often been seen as a vast sequence of unpredictable events. In contrast, many attempts have been made to develop coherent and general theories of history over the years, from Herodotus and Marx through Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse.
The authors argue that the theory of human uniqueness described in Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe generates a theory of history far more powerful and general than any earlier theories. On this approach, human history consists of a series of explosive adaptive revolutions separated by long periods of adaptive stasis (non-progress). Each of these adaptive revolutions results from the application of the 2 million year-old human trick, coercive enforcement of social cooperation, at a new larger scale. The behaviorally modern human revolution (Chapter 10); the agricultural or Neolithic revolutions; the rise of archaic states like the Sumerians, the Romans, the Islamic Empire, the Maya, the Aztecs, the Inca and others (Chapter 13); the rise of early modern states like the France of Louis XIV (Chapter 14); the democratization of modern states (Chapters 15 and 17); and the consolidation of pan-global human cooperation in the contemporary era (Chapter 16) are all examples of such adaptive revolutions. The authors use each of these cases to test the accuracy and usefulness of their new theory of history.
Implications of a Theory of Human Evolution, Behavior and History for the Future
In Chapter 17 the authors explore the implications for the human future of the new theory of human evolution, social behavior and history described in Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe. They argue that we can begin to treat formerly intractable economic and political problems as simple public health problems whose origins and antidotes we can now clearly understand. This discussions ranges across financial markets, human rights, the Second Amendment to the American Constitution, racism, genocide, sexism, ethnocentrism, ethics, science and technology. The authors also argue that we can begin to think productively about engineering a wealthier, wiser, more humane future for all humans on Earth.

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