Where Does Revenge Really Come From?

The claim that humans are “genetically predisposed” to revenge (“A Dish Best Served Cold,” May 11) is based on a faulty understanding of cultural evolution that is, unfortunately, all too common. What distinguished early humans from their proto-human ancestors was the capacity for culture--the rules and codes that govern social life in all human societies. No human societies existed without it.

Evolutionary psychologists imagine a time before culture when humans were governed solely by their instincts and passions, and posit that any cultural trait we witness today--revenge, say--must have been adaptive in that imaginary before-time. This neither explains why such traits persist nor why they would have been adaptive in the first place.

We cannot absolve ourselves of our current unwillingness to grapple with the most troubling cultural issues of our time by pretending that they evolved in the dim mists of our past. Attempting to do so both misconstrues the nature of evolution, the dynamics of culture, and our current political and moral predicament.

--BILL MAURER

Long Beach

Associate professor of

anthropology, UC Irvine