260 HUMAN INTELLIGENCEpersonal costs. So cooperation, too, falls into the selfi sh gene scheme of
a gene’s way of making copies of itself. Th at, in turn, means a par tic u lar
defi nition of intelligence: being smart in that selfi sh sense, as a result of
a lucky deal of genes in the poker game of life.
And yet, in such schemes, confusion remains. Most behavioral ge ne-
ticists, evolutionary psychologists, and sociobiologists prob ably share the
exasperation of Mark Flinn and his colleagues. Th ey agree that humans
have evolved intelligence that is extraordinary: that it is “a spectacular
evolutionary anomaly” and “the evolutionary system behind it as anom-
alous as well.” In keeping with standard Darwinian logic, they look for
a solution in “competition among conspecifi cs” in some specifi c environ-
ment. Unfortunately, they go on, “it has proven diffi cult to identify a set
of selective pressures that would have been suffi ciently unique to the
hominin lineage.”^2 Similarly, Frederic Menger senses the puzzle that
“Modern humans are smarter than what is demanded by our evolution-
ary experience as hunter- gatherers.”^3 We have already noted Michael To-
masello’s observation that natu ral se lection for competitiveness hardly
explains the evolution of cooperation.
Other wise theorists opt for the sweeping, despairing tone of Edward O.
Wilson who, in his book, Th e Meaning of Human Existence, describes
humans as an “ensemble of hereditary regularities in mental development
that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to others and
thus connect genes to culture in the brain of every person.” We are all
“saints and sinners,” he says, “ because of the way our species originated
across millions of years of biological evolution.”^4
I suggest that all this stems from inadequate microscale analy sis of the
way our species did originate at the cognitive level. Th e obvious presup-
position just mentioned is that humans evolved and exist— and their cog-
nitive apparatus is made— for a state of competitive individualism. Th at
assumption, of course, serves a class structure in a free market economy
(the winners are the winners because they are the “best,” most intelligent,
and so on). But it also handicaps attempts to understand human brain
and cognition, distorting even the methods of inquiry.
On this point, I can do no better than quote Uri Hasson and colleagues:
“Although the scope of cognitive neuroscience research is vast and rich,
the experimental paradigms used are primarily concerned with studying
the neural mechanisms of one individual’s behavioral pro cesses. Typical
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