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Paul S. Dachslager, Ph.D.

Initial Reception of My Work

My first book, which was published in 2006, was sent to several evolutionary psychologists. A year later, Edward O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson co-authored a paper defending group selection for the evolution of altruism. I knew that this was one implication of my work. Then, in 2013, Edward O. Wilson published The Social Conquest of Earth, his first book that defended group selection. But the blockbuster came with the publication of David Buss's mammoth two-volume The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (Wiley, 2016).

That publication by David Buss is a collection of papers that summarize in a clear fashion the state of this scientific discipline. It is meant to be accessible to a broad audience, such as those in the humanities who want to learn and apply science in their own areas of scholarship. The ten papers midway through the volume clearly defend group selection, and the paper on evolutionary political psychology, by a Danish political scientist, is basically a twenty-page abstract of my entire model.

This degree of support came as a real shock to me. It was then clear that my work had been undergoing support by way of scientific experiments for many years. Nine years separated the publication of my first book and the Buss Handbook. While the Buss' work could be called a dream come true, it turned out to be only the first of several real epiphanies.

Then came the publication of Edward O. Wilson's The Origins of Creativity, which supports my model for modern art. That the world's most famous evolutionary biologist would support a model for art would surprise most readers. Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now not only supports my model for art, but also my model for evolutionary political theology. Pinker, a professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard University, is a major public intellectual and no pushover. Anthropologist Pascal Boyer, in Minds Create Societies (Yale University Press), puts my model for evolutionary political theology in a broader context of cognitive psychology and anthropology. And studies by anthropologist Bernard Chapais (Psychological Adaptations and the Production of Culturally Polymorphic Social Universals) and primatologist Frans de Waal Mama's Last Hug, (Norton) supports my psychological models for groups, ranks, and imitative resonance.

Then came two books that canonized me as a scientist, and in ways and dimensions that I would never have thought possible—in the modeling of early human evolution and in human behavioral biology—areas in which I have no training and little more knowledge. The studies are Chimpanzees and Human Evolution, edited by Richard Wrangham, and Robert Sapolsky's Behave. Just as winning the Miss Universe competition can reduce women to tears, I can become misty when I think of those two books. And while women cannot avoid the ravages of time, I—or at least my thoughts—can. As the paper that illustrates the Pythagorean Theorem can be burned, so can my books, but not their universality. Richard Wrangham and Robert Sapolsky should be introduced here.

Richard Wrangham is a primatologist and the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. In 1987, he founded the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in the East African nation of Uganda, and recently edited Chimpanzees and Human Evolution. This volume of papers is published by the Belknap Imprint of Harvard University Press, an imprint that was created from a special endowment reserved for books that set new standards in their respective disciplines. A paper by anthropologist Bernard Chapais is included and contains a summary of his paper cited above which supports my psychological model for imitative resonance. Richard Wrangham presents extensive evidence for a chimpanzee-type origin for human beings. In Human Sin or Social Sin, I use several basic chimpanzee behaviors to model history.

Robert Sapolsky is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Neurology and a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University. He is the author of several popular books on the roles of neurology and stress in life. He is also the author of Behave (Penguin), in which he describes the recent findings on the role of neurobiology in structuring group-based behavior and competition. Sapolsky states that most experts in the field now use the method of group selection. I was stunned by this.

Frans de Waal is a primatologist and professor of psychology at Emory University and director of the Living Links Primate Center at Emory. The book that made him famous was Chimpanzee Politics (1982), and he is today the second most popular primatologist after Jane Goodall. His recent book, Mama's Last Hug (Norton, 2019), says many things that support my work, such as: (1) altruism is directed toward in-group members; (2) the West today is highly structured; (3) animal worship among humans is common; (4) formal rank and stratification, as in the military, is best for humans; and (5) today we have the "illusion of free will." Robert Sapolsky wrote a glowing blurb for this book, calling it "important, wise, and accessible." Such high praise is rare among scientists, who are normally more circumspect. This development can only be described as radical.

When major educational institutions produce documentaries on a scientific subject, one can assume that the subject is important. PBS produced a documentary on Edward O. Wilson and group selection entitled Of Ants and Men. National Geographic recently filmed a documentary on Jane Goodall, entitled Jane, in which she could have emphasized anything in chimpanzee behavior, but she specifically concluded with a detailed description of the centrality of group membership to chimp social psychology, which drives group-based violence. So much for "Paradise," for chimps or their next of kin—us.

A foundational study is War: How Conflict Shaped Us (New York: Random House, 2020), by Margaret MacMillan, emeritus professor of International History at Oxford University. It needs to be said that a common response to biological models for war is to jump to the conclusion “that war is inevitable,” and so nothing can be done to stop it. My own father’s response to this problem was to say, “Just because you study earthquakes doesn’t mean that you support earthquakes.” MacMillan responds to this habit of thought, as others do, by noting that an accurate understanding of most things is necessary to create effective controls.

Macmillan moves quickly to cast the problem in terms frequently found in my work—namely, that war evolved through the tension between individual rights and social responsibility. Groups that more effectively create cohesion can win more wars, thereby displacing less cohesive groups, a point I make toward the beginning of Human Sin or Social Sin. MacMillan’s mastery of history allows her to show how details, even in geography, can modify social psychology in different ways in the broad areas of war and conflict.

That a scholar of such standing as Margaret MacMillan, in a book published by Random House, would write such a nuanced study is a sign that the early promise of the Enlightenment is starting to bear fruit in the humanities. (It should be noted here that to view even the human body as a biological organism was taboo during the Enlightenment.)