ii
BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT.
THE BIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE
Is inner-city .violence a response to tbe social ravages ofpoumq, or a biocbemicalsyndrome tbat may
be remedied with drugs? Falloutjom that debate derailed tbe Bush Administration’s .Violence Initiative,
but a school of new Daminians is proposing an unswer that will unsettle both sides.
BY ROBERT WRIGHT
E
9EDERICK GOODW has learned
a lot during a lifetime of studying human behavior, but no lesson
is more memorable than the one dnven
home to him over the past three years:
becoming known as someone who cornpares inner-aty teen-agers to monkeys is
not a ticket to smooth s&g in American public life. As of early 1992, Goodwin’s career had followed a steady upward
course. H e had been the first scientist to
demonstrate c h c a l l y the antidepressant
efl-ects o f lithium, a n d had become
known as a leading, if not the ieading,
expert on manic-depressive Illness. He
had risen to become head of the Alcohol,
Dmg Abuse and Mental Health Administration, the top position for a psychiatrist. in the federal government, and
was poised to be the point man in 3
policy that the Bush Admhstration was
proudly u n v e h g : the Federal Violence
Initiative. T h e idea was to treat violence
as a public-health problem-to iden*
violently inclined youth and provide
therapy early, before they had killed. The
initiarive had the strong support of the
Secretary of Health and Human Services,
Louis SuUivan, and Goodwin planned
to make it his or,&tion’s
main focus.
Then, in early 1992, while discussing
the ifdtiative before the National Mental Health Advisory Councd, Goodwin
made his fateful remarks. Speakmg impromptu-and after a wholly sleepless
rught, he later sad-he gOE offonto an
extended nflabout monkeys. In some
monkey populations, he said, males kd
other males and then, with the competiaon
thus muted, proceed to copulate prolh-
F
c d y with females. These
males, he said, seem to be also “hyper
sexual.’’ By a train of logic that was
endrely dear, he then arrived at the su
gestion that “maybe it isn’t just a carele
use of the word when people cail
xeas of certain cities jungles.”
elaborated a bit on hs obscure
from monkeys to underdass m
no matter, these few fragment
came to form the standard par
his remarks. As the Los h g e
put it, Goodwm “made compariso
tween inner-city youths and vi
oversexed monkeys who live in the
As if a few seemingiy racist qu
weren’t enough of a public-relations
nanza for opponents of the Viole
Initiative, Goodwn also injected w
some took to be Hitlenan overt
,cd about “genetic t-,i:oa” i n c h i n g
mn beings toward vioience, 2nd sug-
;is the buik of :he L ’ I o ~ ~ : I cIniriattve
~
predated the n m e itself, th bulk of i t
sunived the name’s deletion. Thus the
war against the violence initiativelower cm!---rnusr go on.
that one way to spot especially
&,ublesome kids might be to look for
“biological markers” of violent disposition. Within months, the Violence IniHE person who was most respondadve was abandoned, amid charges of
sible for turning Goodwin’s rnon,
the same
ncism. And G o o d T ~ facing
;huge& was reassigned to head the Na- key remarks into a life-changing and
policy-influencing event is a psychiatrist
of hlental Health-not
, but a conspicuous slap named Peter B r e g p , &e founder and
on t‘le wrist. F m d y , last year, he left that txemtive director of the Center for the
Study of Psychlatry, in Bethesda, Maryjob for a position in academe afte
ss horn the Clint0
land, just outside W a s h g o n . T h e cenugh IIO Clinton official ter doubles as B r e g p ’ s home, and the
was a political liability, center’s research director, Ginger Ross
eggin, doubles as Breggin’s wife.
G o o h found himself-no longer invited
oodwin says of Peter Breggin, in reference to the center‘s lack of dminct physical existence, “People who don’t know
any better think he’s a legitimate person.”)
Both Breggins take some credit for
Goodwin’s recent departure from gov, e m e n t . ”GVe’ve been all over the man
havior. It turns’out,believe it or not, that for h e e years,” Ginger Bregin observes.
comparing violent inner-city males to
Goodwin and Peter Brego$n interned
monkeys isn’t necessarily racist, or even together at SUNY Upstate Medical Censsanly right wing. O n the contrary, ter in the nineteen-sixties. Both took a
ily state-of-the-art comprehension c o m e taught by Thomas Szasz, the auof the comparison yields what IS in many thor of ‘The hlyth of Mental Illness,”
ways an archetypally liberal view of the which held that much of psychiatxy is
‘root causes” of urban violence. This merely rn oppressive tool by whch the
comprehension comes via a young, hy- powers that be label inconvenient bebrid academic discipline known as evo- havior “deviant.” Szasz had formed his
lutionary psychology. Goodwin himself world view back when the most common
.dv has Little fandiarity with the form of oppression was locking people up,
..rid doesn’t realize how far to the and Bregin, since foundmg h_lS center, in
left one can be dragged by a modem Dar- 1971, has carried thls view into the age
winian view of the human mind. But of psychopharmacology. H e fought lihhe’s closer to realizing it than the people urn, Goodwin’s initial claim to fame. H e
whose outrage has altered his career.
fought the monoamine-oxidase dubitors,
a somewhat crude generation of antidepressants, and now he fights a younger,
less crude generation of them. T & n g
Back to Prozac,” written in collaboration
with his wife and published last June, is
among the anti-psychopharmacology
books he has recently churned out. So is
“ h e W a r &nst Children,“ published
last f d , in which the Breggins attack
G o o h , the Violence htiative, and also
the drug k t a h n . In Breggin’s view, g ~ v ing R d i n to “hyperactive”chddren is a
way of r e p e n t i n g spirited kids rather
than according them the attention they
need-just as g w n g “anti-aggression”
drugs to inner-city kids would be an CYcuse for conunued negiect. And Breggin is convinced that such drugs wdl br:
used in precisely this fashion if t5a
T
2
G 0 0 d ~ n of.
> the wor!d ge: their way.
IS LS the h d d e n agenda of the Via-
h c e Initiative, he says. And Goodwin
concedes that pharmacological therapy
was a k e l y outcome of the initiative.
Breggin’s all-ernbracing opposition to
psychopharmacology has earned him
reputation among psyduamsts as a “flate m h e r . ” Some, indeed, go further in
their disparagement, and Breggin 1s
aware of h s . “I am not a kook,” he wdl
tell a reporter whether or not the reporter has asked. PeopIe try to discredit
h,
Breg,oin says, because he is a threat
to their i n t e r e s t s t o the money made
“biologicalpsychatrists,” who
heh
status by “medicahzing” everydung they
see. ”How is it that some spiritually p a sionate people become labeled schzophrenic a n d find
treated as mental p
1991 book, T o x i c
Breggin says he is struck by the parallels between the Violence Initiative
and Nazi Germany “the medicalizadon
of social issues, the declaration that the
vicdm of oppression, in this case the Jew,
is in fact a genetically and biologically
defective person, the mobilization of the
state for eugenic purposes and biological
purposes, the heavy use of psychlatq in the
development of sodal-control programs.”
This is the sort of view that encouraged
some members of the Congressional
Black Caucus to demand that Goodwin
be disciplined; it also helped get Bregjn
on Black Entertainment Television, and
led to such headlines in black newspapers as $LOT TO SEDATE BUCK YOUTH.”
Breggin‘s scenario, the question of its
truth aside, did have the rhetorical virtue of simple narrative form. (“He made
a nice story of it,” Goodwin says, in a
tone not wholly devoid of admiration.)
There has lately been much interest h
and much federally funded research into,
the role that the neurotransmitter serotonin plays in violence. O n average,
people with low serotonin levels are
more indined toward impulsive violence
than people with n o m d levels. Since
Goodwin was a co-author of the first
paper noting the correladon between S e
rotonin and violence, he would Seem to
have a natural interesr this issue.
since h e “serotonin-reuptde LnkibitonT”
as Eli Lilly’s ProzaC, raise seroto-
‘3bailI cancel the Henderson meeting?
You have walkies scheduled at t h e .
I’
nin levels, there would seem to exist a
large financial incentive to idennfy low
serotonin as the source of urban U s .
Hence, from Bregjn’s vantage point it d
fell into p1ace-a confluence of corporate
and personal interests that helped make
serotonin the most talked-about biochemical in federal violence research.
But, Breggin says, we musn’t lose sight
of its larger signJficance: serotonin is ‘‘just
a code word for b i o l o g d approaches.”
I
T was in the late seventies that Good-
win and several colleagues stumbled
on the connection between serotonin
and violence, while studymg servicemen
who were being observed for possible
psychiatric discharge. Since then, low
serotonin has been found in other violent populations, such as children who
tornlre animals, children who are unusually hostile toward their mothers, and
people who score h g h for aggression on
standardized tests. Lowering people’s serotonin levels in a laboratory setting
made them more inclined to give a person electrical shocks (or, at least, what
evpenmenters deceived them into thmking were electricd shocks).
It isn’t clear whether serotonin d i u ences aggression per se or simply impulse coneol, since low serotonin correlates also with impulsive arson and with
attempted suicide. But serotonin level
does seem to be a rough predictor of
misbehavlor-a biologcal marker. In a
study of twenty-nine children with “dsruptive behavior disorders,” serotonin
level helped predict future aggression.
And in a National Institutes of Health
study of f%y-eight violent offenders and
impulsive arsonists serotonin level, together with another biochemical index,
predcted with eighty-four-per-cent accuracy whether they would commit
crimes after leaving prison.
It doesn’t take an overactive imagination to envision parole boards screening
prisoners for biological markers before
deciding their fate-just as Goodwin
had suggested that using biological
markers might help determine w h c h
&&en need anaviolence therapy. These
are the h n d s of scenarios that make
Breggin worry about a world in which
the government labels some people genetically deficient and treats them JCcordingly. In reply, Goodwin stresses
3
that 3 ‘bioiogcd” marker r,erd?‘:
be a ’‘ynenc”one. Though 3 I H
studies suggest that some people 3
genes are conducive to low berotonm, er. L ,~nmental influezces
can also lower serotonin, and
federal researchers are stud?ir,g
these. Thus a “biological” rnar!ter
may be an “environmental” rnarxer, nor: a “genetic” one. To :his
Breggin replies, “It’s not whar
they believe, it‘s not in a rnlUlon
years what they really beheve.”
This anernpt to cast b i o l o g d
research as research into e n w o n ment ‘‘shows their desperation,
because this was never thw argument until they got attacked,”
he says. “It‘s a political move.”
I n truth, federal researchers,
including Goodwin, were looking
into “environment
ences”
on biochemistry w
re being attacked by Breggn. S t d ,
they do often employ a narrower
notion of the term’s meaning
than Bregogin would like. When.
Goodwin talks about such influences, he doesn’t dwell on the
sort of sociai forces that interest
Breg$n, such as poverty and bad
schools. H e says, for example, that he
has looked into “data on head injuries,
victims of abuse, poor prenatal nutrition,
h g h e r levels of lead,” and so on.
In other words, he is indined to mew
violence as an Jlness, whether it is the
product of aberrant genes or of pathological-deeply
unnatural-circumstances, or both. This is not surpnsing,
given his line of work he is a psychiat r i s t , a doctor; hts job is to cure people,
and people without pathologies don’t
need curing. “Once I learned that
seventy-nine per cent of repeated violenr
offenses were by seven per cent of youth,
it began to look to me like a clinical
population, a population that had something wrong with it that resulted in &us
behavior,“ he says. Other federal researchers on violence tend to take the
same approach. M e r all, most of them
work at one ofthe National Institutes of
Health, whether the National Insmure
ofMental Health, the National Instmte
on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, or
some other & L a t e , For the Violence
Tnitiative to be successhl in the prigmatic aims that Goodwin acknowla way “to q u e for budgets”
edges-as
.
‘
:
for :hc D e p c m z n t of I-Iedth :,nd 1 1 1 ~ - i C ) c : b,OLbrj 3 r d >re c:i~.rj:~7?, 2 ~ ,ve
. b e 2” n p p d OC
S?mi;es-it
pretty much had to 20 R ’ t id i t theft
de5ne vlolence 2s 3 pathology, chuac- by poLt:cai agendas o r 3 i ~ - b u s i n e s s
teristic of inner-city iuds who hav- practices.” A4.nd3s for gar,? t-,olence: “It’s
a coalition of males who are mumally
something “wrong” with them.
Breggm would rather depict vlolence supporung each other to ;erne h e r inas the not very surpnsing reaction of terests against some other coalition
FTIX
1
normal people to oppressive circumstances. X bis problem wtth biological
mews of behamor Senerdy, he says, is
tha: they so often bolsrer the medical
nocons of“devlance” and ‘pathology”and thus divea anenDon from the need
ro change social conltions.
But “biologcal” News don’t have to be
“medical” mews. Ths is where the field
of evolutionary psychology enters the
picture, and modern Darwinian thought
b e p s to diverge from Goodwin’s sketchier and more dated ideas about human
evolution. Evolutionary psychologists
share Goodwin’s conviction that genes,
neurotransmitters such as serotonin, and
biology more generally are a valid route
to explaining human behavior, and they
share his belief in the relevance of studying nonhuman primates. Yet they are
much more.open than he is to the
Bregginesque view that inner-city violence is a “naturd” reaction to a particular social environment.
To most N.I.H.
researchers, evolutionary psychology is terra incognita.
Goodwin, for one, professes o d y vague
awareness of the field. But the field
offers something that should intrigue
him: a theory about what s e r o t o m is,
in the deepest s e n s e w h y natural selecaon designed it to do the dungs it does.
?his theory would explain, for example,
the effect that P r m c has on people. More
to the point, h s theory would explain
the link that Goodwin htmself discovered between low serotonin and violence.
How is that different from some internauond war”’
To h e u this sort of !laming ltberd
rheroric from a confirrned Darwinian
should surprise not jcsr Perer Breggm
but anyone f d u w~chmtellecrud I u s tory For much of this century, many
people who took a Darwinian mew of
human behamor embraced the notonous
ideology of social D m n i s m . They emphadcally did not mew socid deviance as
some arbitrary and self-serving d e s i p a tion made by the ruling class; more
likely, m e was a sign of “unfitness,” of
an innate inabhty to thrive legitimately.
T h e “unfit” were best left to languish in
jad, where they could not reproduce.
And “unfit” would-be immigrantsthose from, say, Eastern Europe, who
were congenitally Lu equipped to enrich
h e n c a n society-were best kept out of
the country.
W h a t permits Margo W i l s o n to
sound a quite M e r e n t theme is t#o dlsMguishing features of evolutionary psy-
L ~ , Fi:at,
~ p,oi,*
; ~ or,
~ IT” Z I S ) C P O . I J Fsrs are not much !nre:es:ec! In ,rrt.netii
cifie;ences, whether m o n g individuais
or among goups. The object of study IS,
rather, “species-typical mental adaptat1ons”-&o
known as “huma
A basic tenet of evolution7
g s r s IS that there 15 such a thmg as human nature-that
people everywhere
have fundamentdy the
minds
A second tenet of evolutiomry psychoiogsts is respect for h e power ofenwonment. T h e human mmd, they say)
has been designed to adjust to social CKcumstances. T h e vital dkkrence between this and earlier forms of environmental determinism IS the word
“designed.” Evoluuonary psychologsts
believe that the developmental programs
that convert social evpenence into personality were created by natural selecuon, which is to say that those programs
lie in our genes. Thus, to think clearly
about the influence of environment we
must think about what sorts of influences would have been favored by
natural selection.
If, for example, early social rejection
makes people enduringly insecure, then
we should ask whether this pattern of
development might have had a gene5c
payoff d u n g evolution. Maybe people
T
HE two acknowledged c ~ p e r t son
human violence within evoludonary psychology are Martin Daly and
Margo ’CVison, of McMaster Universiv,
in Ontario. Their 1988 book, “Honiude,”
barely known outside Darwinian-socialscience circles, is considered a classic
wihn them. Listening to Margo Wilson talk about urban crime is like enterng a time warp and finding yourself
:hatting with Huey Newton or Jane
Fonda in 1969. “First of d,what’s a
crime?”she asks. It dl depends on “who
are the de-makers, who’s in power. W e
c d l it theft when somebody comes into
‘7was ratbcr hoping a Passaic Riwer Scboo(
mightform, but sofar it’sjust me.”
72
1 ~ i e d> i l c h :e;eit:on sJ:v their
chances o f sumivai m d reproduction
plummet unless they became more 50c i d y vigdant-neu:oticdy
amntive to d i e larger and stronger than women.
nourish!; thelr jocid :xs. Thus genes Such “ s e n d dimorphism” is seen in
that responded to rejection Sji instding many species, and biologsts consider it
this neurotic mgJance, this insecuriv, a rough index of h e intensity of mde
would have flourisned. A i d eventudy jelcuai competition.
To say that during evolution men
those genes could have spread through the
species. becoming pm of human nature. have fought over women isn’t to say that
These two themes-upversal human iheji’ve always fought directly over
women, wdcl the wmner of a bout walknanlre and the power of environmentare related. It is behef in the power of ing over and darning hs nubde trophy.
enmoment-of family mdieu, cultural Rather, human beings are somewhat
mheu, social happenstancethat allows like our nearest relauves, the c h p a n evolutionary psychologists co see great zees: males compere for status, and stavariation in human behavior, from per- tus bnngs access to females. Hence slutls
son to person or from group to group, conducive to successful status competiwidlout reflexively concluding that the tion would have a “selective advanexplanation lies in genetic variation. The tage”-would be favored by narural seexplanation lies in the ger - to be sure. lection. As Daly and Wilson have put it,
\Viere else could a progr;l for psycho- “if status has persistently contributed to
logical development ultimately reside? reproductive success, and a capacity for
But it doesn’t necessarily lie in diffe- controlled violence has regularly contnbrences among different people’s genes. uted to status, then the selective advanT h s is the perspective that Martin tage of violent skills cannot be ,pinsaid.”
It’s easy to find anecdotal evidence
Daly and Margo Wilson bring to the
subject ofviolence. They thinkabout genes that status has indeed tended to boost
in order to undersrand the role of envi- the reproductive success of males. (It
ronment. And one result of t h s outlook was H e n r y Kibsinger who said that
is agreement with Peter Breggin that power is an aphrodisiac, and Represeninner-city violence shouldn’t be labelled tative Pat Schroeder who observed that
a “patholog.” I n a paper published last a middle-aged congresswoman doesn’t
ye= Daly and Wdson wrote, “Violence evert the same animal magnetism on the
is abhorrent. . . . Violence is so aversive opposite sex that a middle-aged conthat merely witnessing an instance can gressman does.) Bur more telling is embe Iiterdy sickening. . . .” T ere is thus dence drawn from hunter-gatherer so“but a short leap to the metaphorical cieties, the closest thing to real-life
characterization of violence itself as a evamples of the pre-agranan social consort of ‘sickness’ or ‘dyshncti n.’ ” But, text for which the human mind was dethey hsisted, this leap is ill adwed. Vio- signed. Among the Ache of Paraguay,
lence is eminently function&--some- high-status men have more extramarital
affairs and more illegitimate children
thing that people are designed to do.
Especially men. From an evolution- than low-status men. Among the Aka
;uy point of view, the leading cause of b o m i e s of central Africa, an informal
violence is maleness. “Men have evolved leader known as a kombeti gets more
the morphological, physiological and wives and offspring than the average
psychologcal means to be effective us- Aka. And so on. T h e Aka, the Ache,
ers of violence,” Daly and Wilson wrote. and Henry Kissinger al.! demonstrate
T h e re:tson, according to modem evo- that violence against other men is hardly
tionaxy thought, is simple. Because a the only means by w h c h male status is
male can reproduce only once a year, sought. Being a good hunter is a pnmary
eas a male can reproduce many route to status among the Ache, and befemales are the scarcer ing a wdy s o c i i rnmpulator helps in all
. Dunng evolunon, males soueties (even, it t u m s out, in c h p sod over this resource, with
mpregnating more than
their share of women and the losers impreqming few or none. As always with
natural selection, we’re left wirh the
kcho
1F:
aeries, where maies A m b h e s t a r s !;cder by forging “political” coali:!onj)
S t d , in al: human societies questions oi
relative male status xre sometimes setded
through fighting. ? h s form of setdemenr
is, of course, more prevalent in some
arenzs than orhers-more in a bkers’
bar than in the Russian Tea Room,
more in the inner city than on the Upper East Side. But, as DaIy and WLLsor,
note, one theme holds true everywhere:
men compete for status through the
means locally avdable. If men in &e
Russian Tea Room don’t assault one another, that’s because assault isn’t the
route to status in the Russian Tea Room.
According to Daly and Wilson, a
f d u e to see the importance of such circumstances is what leads well-heeled
people to express patronizing shock that
“trivial” arguments in barrooms and
ghettos escalate to murder.
omicide” they wrote, “Animplicit contrast is
drawn between the foolishness of violent
men and the more rational motives that
move sensible people like ourselves. The
combatants are in effect denigrated as
creatures of some lower order of mental
hctioning, evidentty governed by immedixte stimuli l a k e r than Ly fxesigh6.d
contemplation.” In truth, D d y and Wiison say, such combatants are typical of
our species, as it has been observed
around the world: “In most soaal d e u s ,
a man’s reputation depends in part upon
the maintenance of a credible threat of
violence.“ l k s fact is “obscured in modem mass society because the state has assumed a monopoly on h e legitimate use
of force. But wherever that monopoly is
relaxed-whether in an entire soaety or
in a neglected underdass-then the u d ity of that credible threat becomes apparent.” I n such an environment, “a
seemingly minor afiroht is not merely a
‘stimulus’ to action, isoiated in tine and
space. It must be understood w h n a
larser social context of reputations, face,
relative social status, and e n d G n g relationships. Men are known by their fellows as . . . people whose word means
amon and people who are iull of hot air.”
That a basic purpose of violence is
display-to convince peers that you d
defend your status-helps explin an
otherwise puzzling fact. As Daly and
Wilson note, when men lull men whom
they know, there is usuaiiy an audience.
This doesn’t seem to make sense-why
murder someone in the presence of\vlt-
.
performance.
Thus the dismay often insplred by reports that a black teen-ager U e d because he had been “dissed” is naive.
Sothing was more vltal to the reproducw e success of our male anceston than
respect, so there is nothing that the male
rmnd d more feverishly seek to neucalize than disrespect ;ui men spend
much of then lives doing exactly this;
most are just lucky enough to live in a
place where guns won’t help them do it.
These days, well-educated men do thelr
status maintenance the way Goodwin
and B r e g j n do it, by verbally defending their honor and verbally assailing the
honor of their enemies. But back when
duelling was in vogue even the most
polished of men might occasionally try
to lull one another.
T
1
HXS view from evolutionary psychology in some ways jibes with a
rarely quoted point that Goodwin made
during his rambling remarks on monkeys: that inner-city violence may be
caused by a “loss of smcture in society”;
in an environment where violence is
deemed legitimate, the male inclination
for violence may reassert itself. Of monkeys, Goodwin had said, “that is the
natural way of it for males, to knock
each other off,” and the implicit comparison was supposed to be with all human males, not just black ones; hs point
was that many black males now live in
neighborhoods where social restraints
have dissolved. T h i s is the sense in
which Goodwin says he meant to compare the inner cities to jungles, and the
transcript of his remarks bears lun out.
His poor choice of imagely s t d haunts
him. “If I had said that in the Wild
West, where there was no structure,
there w a s a hell of a lot of violence, no
one would have noticed.”
There is a crucial M e r e n c e between
this emphasis on social milieu as rendered by Goodwin and a$ rendered by
evolutionary psychologists; namely, they
don’t abandon it when they start thinking about the interface between biology
and environment. Whereas pondemg
h s interface steers Goodwin’s thoughts
toward “patho1oa”-the blological
effects of mdnutrihon, or brain damage
due to child abuse--evolutionq psychologists try to figure out how normal,
,
I
’
‘Marie, I think I’vejinished
my novel!”
eveFday experience 31<ki:~C ~ Sbioi,Ttxistr>: ofviolense.
Consider serotonin. In parTicuiar,
consider an extensive study of serotonin
in monkeys done by hIichael hlcGuire,
an evolutiona.ry psychologist, and his
colleagues at 1J.C.L.A.Vervet monkeys
h v e a clear mde social hierarchy: lowstatus males defer to high-starus males
over access to limited resources, including females. McGuire found that the
highest-ranlung monkeys in the male
social herarchy have the hghest serotonin 1eveI.s.\Wlat‘s more, the lower-ranking males ten:d to be more impdsively
violent. Other studies have Linked low
serotonin to violence in monkeys even
more dxectly.
At first glance, such findings might
appear to be what Peter Breggin, and
many liberals, would consider their
worst nightmzre. If this biochemical
analogy between monkeys and human
beings is indeed valid, the lesson would
seem to be this: some individuals are born
to be society’s leaders, some are born to
be its hoodlums; the chairman of I.B.M.
Sori: w:th h y n >erorotxn,[he urban
?zag
member was born w:th !ow sero2
what i f i t turns o u t that
erotonin
Lvah
There certainly is evldence that some
sort of analogy between the social lrves
of monkeys and human beings IS in order. McGulre has found h a t officers of
college fratemties have hgher serotomn
levels &an L$e average fiat-house residenr, and &at college athletes perceived
as team ledders have hgher levels than
thex average teammate. But grasping
the import of tFle analogy requlres delving into the d e t d s of McGuire’s monkey research.
When PIcGulre examines a dominant male monkey before he becomes a
dominant-before he climbs the social
hierarchy by winning some key fights
with other,males--serotonin level is often unexceptional. It rises during his ascent, apparently in response to sometimes inconspicuous social cues. Indeed,
his serotonin may b e p to creep upward
before he physically challenges any
“But, in the md, yozr ,will becomc. bored with that, too.”
-.
.
.._,
..
. . ..-..
,.,..
.. __._
.
’7
..-,, . .-..---
higher-ranhng mdes, :he init1.d risz
may be caused by favorable attention
from females (who play a larger role in
shaping the male social hierarchy than
was once appreciated). When, on the
other hand, a dominant male sfiers a
loss of starus, h s serotonin level drops,
What’s going on here? There is no
way to look inside a monkey’s mind and
see how serotonin make!: him feel. But
here is mdence that in human b e m 3 hlgh
serotonin levels bnng h g h self-esreem.
h s i n g self-esteem I S one effect of P r m c
and other serotonin boosters, such as Zoloft. And, indeed, hgh-raniung monk e y s - o r , to take a species more closely
related to us, high-ranking chmpanzees-tend to behave the way people
with hgh self-esteem behave: with calm
self-assurance; assertively, yes, but seldom violently. (Ths subtle distinction,
as Peter G a m e r notes in “Listening to
Prozac,” is also seen in human beings.
Prozac may make them more socially assertive, but less irritable, less prone to
spontaneous outbursts.) To be sure, an
alpha-male chimp may periodically exhibit aggression-or,
really, a
kind of ritual mock-agggessionto remind everyone that he’s the
boss, but most alphas tend not
to be as fidgety and perturbable
as some lower-ranking apes, except when leadership is being
contested.
All this suggests a hypothesis.
iMaybe one function of serotonin-in human and nonhuman
primates-is
to regulate selfesteem in accordance with soaal
feedback, and maybe one h n c don of self-esteem is, in turn,to
help primates negotiate social
hierarchies, dimbing as high on
the ladder as circumstance permits. Self-esteem (read serotonin) keeps rising as long as one
encounters social success, and
each step in this elevation indines one to raise one’s social
sights a little higher. Variable
self-esteem, then, is evolution’s
way of preparing us to reach and
maintain whatever level of social
status is reahtic, given our vanous attributes (social skrlls, talent, etc.) and our mdieu. High
serotonin, in this view, isn’t
nature’s way of deshning people
horn birth for high starus; it 1s
n;;Tdre’S way of equipping m y of lis for
high jtaitu~should we find ourselves
possessing it. The &p side of this hypothesis is that low self-esteem (and low
serotonin) is evolution’j way of equipping us for low starus should our situation not be conducive to elevation.
This doisn’t mean what an earlier
veneration of evolutionists would have
Fhought: that AIother Nature wants
people wi~!!!ow stams to endure their
f3ce patiently for ”the greater good.” Just
&e opposite. X foundmg insight of evodonary psychology is that natural selection rarely designs things for the
“Food
b
of the group.” Any psychological
inclinations that offer a way to cope with
low status provide just t h a t a way to
cope, a way to make the best of a bad
situation. T h e purpose of low selfesteem isn’t to bring submission for the
sake of social order; more Wceiy, its purpose is to discourage people from conspicuously challenging higher-status
people who are, by virme of thcir status,
in a position to punish such insolence.
A
-J
ND what about the antisocial tenden-
des, the impulsive behavior linked
S
with low serotonin in both human beings and monkeys? How does evolutionary psychology explain them? This is times be fiercest near the bottom of the
where the demise of “good of the group” scde, where the man on track for total
[reproductive] f d u r e has nothing to lose
logic opens the way for especially in:
t r i p g theories. In particular: primates by the most dangerous competitive tacmay be designed to respond to low sta- tics, and may therefore throw caution to
tus by “breaking the rules” when they the winds.” Even as low self-esteem
can get a m y with it. The established so- keeps him from challenging dominant
cial order isn’t working in their favor, SO males, he may behave recklessly toward
they circumvent its strictures at every those closer to h m on the socid ladder.
opportunity. Similarly, inner-city thugs Thus may the biochemisny of low stamay be functioning as “designed”: their tus, along with the attendant states of
minds absorb environmental input re- mind, encourage impulsive risk-taktng.
Tnts theory, at my rate, would help
flecting their low socioeconomic standing and the absence of “legitimate” make sense of some long-unexplained
routes to soaal elevation, and indine their data. Psychologists found several decades
behavior in the appropriately criminal ago that artificially lowering people’s
self-esteem-by p i n g them false redirection.
T h e trouble with breaking rules, of ports about scores on a personality testcourse, is the risk of getting caught and makes them more likely to cheat in a
punished. But, as Daly and Wilson note subsequent game of cards. Such r i s k y
by quoting Bob Dylan, ?%%en you ain’t r u l e - b r e h g is just the sort of behavior
got nothm’, you got nothin’ to lose.” In that makes more sense for a low-status
the environment of our evolution, low animal than for a hgh-status animal.
T o say that serotonin level is heavily
:’atus often signified that a male had
h2d l i d e or no reproductive success to influenced by social experience isn’t to
date; for such a male, tdung risks to raise say that a person’s genetic idiosyncrasies
Status could make sense in Darwinim aren’t sigrlificant. But it is to say that
terms. In hunter-gatherer societies, Ddy they are at best half the story. There are
a d L V h n write, “competition can some- not yet any definitive studies o n the
S
“heritability” of serotonin level-the
amount of the variation among people
that is explained by genetic difference.
But the one study that has been done
suggests that less than half the variation
in the population studied came from
genetic differences, and the rest from
dderences in environment. And even
this estimate of heritabdity is probably
misleadingly high. Presumably, selfesteem correlates with many other personal attributes, such as physique or facial attractiveness. Impressive people, after all, inspire the sort of feedback that
raises self-esteem and serotonin. Since
these attributes are themselves quite
heritable-mceable largely to a person’s
distinctive genes-ome
of the “heritability” estimate for s e r o t o h may reflect
genes not for high serotonin per se but
for good looks, great body, and so on.
(The technical term for &s oblique genetic effect is “reactive heritabdiity.”)
At least some of the variation in serotonin level is grounded more directly
in genetic dierence. N.I.H.
researchers
have identified a human gene that helps
convert tryptophan, an amino LCld
found in some grains m d fruits, into se-
I
I
76
of inner-cin’ blolence WL!I probao,;
never be expixned by reference ;O
head injuries, poor numtron, prenatal exposure to drugs, a n d bJd
genes. If violence IS a pubhc-health
problem, it is SO m d y in the sense
that getting k d e d 1s bdd for your
health
Evoluuonary psychology depic:j
all kmds of things often thought io
be “patholopcal” as “natural” upzpelding h m e d , mild depression, J
tendency of men to treat women 2s
therr personal property Some Duwnians even dunk that rape may m
some sense be a “natural” response
to certam cucumstances. O f course,
to call these things “natural” isn’r to
call them beyond self-control, or beyond the influence of punishment
h n d it certainly isn’t io cdl them
‘Tcan’t sleep. Ijzut got this inrrzciible.craving for capital.”
good. If anythmg, evolutionary psychology might be invoked on behaltof the doctrine of Orignal Sin: we
Another hidden complexity in this are in some respects born bad, and
rotonin, and they have found a version
of the gene that yields low serotonin lev- Darwinian theory lies in the fact that se- redemption entails struggle against
els. Still, there is no reason to believe that rotonin does lots of thmgs besides me- our nature.
LMany people, including many soc:al
different ethnic groups have different ge- diate self-esteem and impulsive aggesn e t ; ~endowments for scrstonin. Indeed, sion.Precisely what it does depends on scientists and biomedical researchers,
l - , the idei of 3
even Zit turned out that American blacks the part of the brain it is afl‘ectm,~and seem to have t r ~ d ~ bith
on average had lower serotonin than the levels of other neurotransmitters. conflict between nature and morahty. ‘I
whites, there would be no cause to impli- Over-all serotonin level is hardly the think this is a source of resistance to
a t e genes. One would expect groups that subtlest imaginable chemical index of evolutionary ways of thinking,” says
find themselves shunted toward the bot- a human beings mental state. Still, John Tooby, a professor at the Univertom of the socioeconomic hierarchy to though we don’t yet fathom the entire siiy of California at Santa Barbara, who .
have low serotonin. That may be nature’s biochemistry of thtngs like self-esteem, d i n g with hs wife, Leda Cosmides, laid
way of preparing them to take nsks and impulsiveness, and violence, there is down some of the founding doctrines of
to evade the rules of the powers that be. little doubt among evolutionary psy- evolutionary psychology. “There’s 3.
This Darwinian theory integrating chologists that the subject is fathom- strong. tendencv to want to r e m to thc
that it will get fathomed romantic notion that the natural is the
serotonin, sratus, and impulsive violence able-and
remains meagrely tested and is no doubt much faster if biomedical researchers, at good.” Indeed, “one modern basis for
and elsewhere, start h l u n g in establishing morals is to try to ground
oversimplified. O n e complicating factor N.I.H.
is modem life. People in contemporary Darwinian terms.
them in the notion of sickness. b y America are part of various social h e r thing people don’t like, they accuse the
F evolutionary psychologists are right person doing it of being sick”
arche:;. An inner-city gang leader may
in even the broad contours of thex
get great, serotonin-boosting respect
Thomas Szasz couldn’t have said i
(“juice,” as the suggestive street slang outlook, then there is good news and better. Herein Lies evolutionary p ~ y c
calls it) from fellow gang members whde bad news for both Frederick Goodwn ow’s good news for Peter Bre@n:
also gemng serotonin-sapping s i g n s of and Peter Breggin. For Goodwin, the it is indeed misleading to c d most
disrespect when he walks into a tony good news is that hs infamous remarks Ience a pathology, a disorder. The
jewelry store, or even when he turns on the were essentlally on target: he was nght news for Breggin IS that, even tho
T V and sees that wealthy, hgh-status to compare vlolent inner-city m a l e s - o r the causes of violence are broadly
males tend to bear no physical or cultural any other violent human males-to
ronmental, as he insists, they are “0
resemblance to hun.The human mind was nonhuman pnrnates (though he exag- theless biological, because e n m
gerated the incidence of actual murder tal forces are medlated biologic
designed for a less ambiguous settinga hunter-gatherer society, in which a among such primates). The bad news is h s case by, among other h n
young man’s social reference points stay that h s Violence Initiative, in faj;ng to tonin. Thus, a scientist
fairly constant from day to day. W e pursue that insight, in dingmg to the c~ew logical determimst” or a “blo
don’t yet know how the mind responds of vlolence as pathology, wzs doomed to ductionist” without being a gc
sar“3.5
to a ivorld of d d y chshin,G- St3tuS cues. miss a large p m of the picture; the b u k determinist. He or she
I
’3
--_-
-
--_____-
---___
MORNING AFTER A DLIZZARD
Le
W h a t could they possibly need to bury in heaven?
Imaginary playmates, secret lives
who wait their turn,
perhaps relieved to be going arrong h e i r h n d ,
among the mortal necessities,
the wheelchms, a s s e s , heaps of bli’ocds,
the huge corieccve shoes,
untd those foyers at the e n u E c e iesernble scarions
m one of hstor).’s recurring dreams.
Some mghts one h e x s a = a n approachng.
W7hoz1 be assigned to dig the p v e s
in which each figure of despair lies down in an obscunv
so k e these snowbanks, pine-splayed without
relief, pine-dappled here?
Even the shovel is transcription, a dream toy,
unless it scrapes the earth.
h4y mother says her death d de@ gravity,
her body beyond j shadow nnsed of memory,
so w h t e it seals * e eyes, and all they’ve seen,
the rooms buried in whtch we sat,
a family always wrong year after year,
snowfall by snowfd,
the mother weeping, the father praying aloud,
each word out of his mouth
another cave h s h e d by shipwreck
the chicken d e n t ,
the daughters still in their nightgowns
dozing against each other or lost in the analogy,
lost, as partway duough a wish that feels like distance,
Roman light, or sea glass, glint off the Atlantic
glimpsed from the air.
W h a t could be monument toward h s lightness?
Faith turned to stone?
This is what it was to be aLve, saved.
This was love as we knew it.
x
-DEBORAH DICGES
1
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3
d
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h
:e
Id
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1t
31-
es,
10-
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1Vl-
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and Wilson and Tooby and Cosmides
do-that human behavior is dnven by
biological forces impinging on the
brain, yet can view those forces largely
as a reflection of a person’s discinctive
environment.
Ths confronts Breggin with a major
rhetorical complication. M u c h of his
success in arousing opposition to the
Violence Initiative lay in conveniently
conflating the terms “biological” and
“Zenetic.” H e does this habitually. In
,uggesdng thar the initiative grew out of
Goodwin’s long-standmg designs, Bregg n says he has Baltimore Evening Sun
anides from 1983 in w h c h “Goodwin
is t&ng about crime and violence be-
--_
ing genetic and biological.” I n truth,
these articles show Goodwin saying
n o h g about genes-ody that violence
has some biological correlates and might
respond to pharmacological treatment.
In Breggin’s mind, “genetic” and “biologrcal” are joined at the waist.
That these terms are not, in fact, inseparable--that
something utterly biological, like serotonin level, may differ
between M O people because of environmental, not geneac, dfierences-poses
a second problem for Breggqn. T h e best
way to illuminate the environmental
forces he stresses may be tg study the
biological underpinnings of behavior,
and that is a prospect he loathes. If se-
rotonin is one c h e r n i i d that conver:j
poverty m d disrespect into impulsiveness o r aggression or low self-esteem,
then it, along with other chemicals, may
be a handy index of all these things o m e h n g whose level can be monitored
more precisely than the things themselves. (Studies finding that blacks on
average don’t suffer fiom low self-esteem
are based on asking black people and
white people how they feel about thems e h e s a dubious approach, smce LyresSiOnS of humility seem to be more hghiy
valued in w h t e suburban culture than in
black urban culture.)
That Breggin may be wrong in the
way he h n k s about biology and behavior doesn’t mean that the unsettling scenarios he envisions are far-fetched. The
government may well try to use biochemical “markers” to select violently inc h e d kids for therapy, or to screen prisoners for parole. (Then a p n , if these
chemicals aren’t simple “genetic markers,” but rather are summanes of the way
genes and environment have together
molded a person’s state of mind, how
are they different tiom a standard psychological evaluation, which summarizes the same thing?)There may also be
attempts to treat violently kclined teenagers with serotonin-boosting drugs, as
Breggin fears. And, though some teenagers might thus be helped into the
mainstream economy, the:. drugs could
also become a palliative, a m y to keep the
inner city tranquil without improving it.
The brave new world of biochemical diagnosis and therapy is coming and, for
dl the insight evolutionary psycholog
brings, it won’t magically answer the
difficult questions that will arise.
The point to bear in mind is simply
that less eerie, more traditionally liberal prescriptions for urban violence continue to make sense after we’ve looked
at black teen-agers as animals-which,
after all, is what human beings are. ’The
mew from evolutionary psychology suggests that one way to reduce black violence would be to make the inner cities
places where young men have nonwolent routes to social status and the means
and motivation to follow them. Betterpaying jobs, and better public schools,
for example, wouldn’t hurt. Oddly
enough, thinlung about genes from a
Darwinian standpoint suggests that
inner-city teen-agers xe vlctims of their
environment. +