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It takes little imagination to see this sorting process at work across professions. Someone who believes that fairness is the
highest moral value will want to choose a vocation where they can exert this value, perhaps as a public defender, a teacher
of underprivileged children, or a sports referee. Those who believe, instead, that fairness is an unimportant value might
find themselves drawn to the prosecutorial side of the law, or high-pressure sales, or indeed, Gordon Gekko’s caricature
of predatory finance. This is not to say that everyone in those professions shares those values, of course, but rather that
individuals with those values may find such professions more congenial—a form of natural selection bias—and will,
therefore, eventually be statistically over-represented in that subpopulation.
At the same time that evolution shapes individual behavior, it also acts on how individuals relate to one another. We call
the collective behavior that ultimately emerges from these interactions “culture.” Many forms of collective and group
behavior have been conceptually difficult for classical evolutionary theory to explain since it is primarily a theory centered
on the reproductive success of the individual, or even more reductively, of the gene. Recent research in evolutionary
biology, however, has revived the controversial notion of “group selection,” in which groups are the targets of natural
selection, not just individuals or genes. Although many evolutionary biologists have rejected this idea, arguing that
APRIL 2016
48 | TECHNICALLY SPEAKING