The mean gene

One of Nicholas Wade's premises in Before the Dawn, or perhaps a premise of one of his main sources, is that a “peaceful gene” or combination thereof, somehow arose about 15,000 years ago and made it possible for humans to stop killing their neighbors and get along. Civilization is the result.

(Susan believes that the event was no accident of random drift or mutation. It must have been precipitated by women who were sick of all the pointless killing and conspired to either kill or castrate all the warlike men and then proceeded to mate only with the peaceful men, thus ensuring the spread of the peaceful gene.)

However, Jared Diamond’s story in the current, New Yorker (April 21, 2008, p. 74) entitled "Vengeance Is Ours," calls into question whether the mean gene ever did get replaced or whether Wade’s premise lays too much on a genetic explanation. Here’s the précis:

In 1992, Daniel Wemp‘s paternal uncle Soll was killed in a battle against the neighboring Ombal clan. In the New Guinea Highlands, where Daniel and his Handa clan live, the responsibility for arranging revenge for Soll’s killing fell to Daniel. It took three years, twenty-nine more killings, and the sacrifice of three hundred pigs before he succeeded. Soll was killed in a “public fight”—one fought in the open between large groups of warriors separated by a considerable distance. It’s often impossible to tell who’s responsible for a kill. For that reason, the target of Daniel’s revenge was not Soll’s killer but another Ombal man, Henep Isum, who’d organized the fight. Handas are taught from early childhood to hate their enemies and to prepare themselves for a life of fighting. His first attempt at revenge was a failure, so he hired over two hundred men from other villages as allies for his next attempt. Mentions intermarriage between enemy clans. Since Isum was Daniel’s relative by marriage, Daniel was not permitted to kill him, but he could hire men to kill him. In the three years following Soll’s death, there were six battles. In the sixth battle, the Handas sent out several groups of stealth killers, one of whom shot Isum with an arrow, which cut his spinal cord and permanently paralyzed him. Daniel was unapologetic and enthusiastic about Isum’s punishment, although Daniel himself was now, of course, a target for Ombal revenge. Daniel said, “I admit that the New Guinea Highland way to solve the problem posed by a killing isn’t good…we are always in effect living on the battlefield.”

Diamond makes the tale personal by relating the experience of his late father-in-law, Jozef Nabel, who passed up the opportunity for vengeance and lived to regret it bitterly. Jozef was a Polish Jew who was captured by the Soviets in 1939 and sent to a Siberian camp before becoming an officer in a Polish division of the Red Army. In the summer of 1945, he led an armed platoon to Klaj, Poland, to discover what had happened to his mother, his sister, and his niece. There he learned that an armed gang had shot them, but when he was face-to-face with the man who led the gang, he hesitated to shoot. Instead, he delivered him to the police, who investigated the crime and then, after about a year, released the murderer. Until his death, Jozef remained tormented by regret at his failure to take vengeance.

Maybe this will placate some of Diamond's political foes. (See the Jan. 1, 2008 post The politics of science.) In this case, Wade is the one arguing that there is such a thing as human nature and Diamond seems to argue that it's the system.