The Soul of Science
The Purpose Pyramid
With provisional purpose we define our goals, but there is an
inherent structure to the human condition that helps delimit our
search. By combining psychologist Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of
needs and ethicist Peter Singer's expanding circle of sentiments,
one can depict the 1.5 million years over which such drives and
sentiments evolved among humans and our social-primate ancestors. At
the bottom of the pyramid, the individual's needs for survival and
reproduction—food, drink, safety and sex—are met through
the family, extended family and community. Moving up the pyramid,
psychosocial needs—security, bonding, socialization,
affiliation, acceptance and affection—have evolved to aid and
reinforce cooperation and altruism, traits that benefit individuals
and the group. About 35,000 years ago, social groups grew larger and
cultural selection began to take precedence over natural selection.
The natural progression of this upwards trend is to perceive
societies as part of the human species and the human species as part
of the biosphere.
The width of the pyramid at each level reflects the degree to which
purposeful sentiment is under evolutionary control. The height of
each level indicates the degree to which purposeful sentiment
extends beyond us. Thus, the pyramid shows that these two variables
are inversely related—the more a sentiment helps a complete
stranger, the less it owes to specific evolutionary mechanisms.
Selfish genes drive kin altruism, and social relations fuel
reciprocal altruism, but to achieve species- and bio-altruism, we
need to learn higher-order prosocial behavior. Achieving the upper
levels of the pyramid requires social and political action. We
evolved in a manner in which our concern for the environment was
highly restricted, and global ecology and deep time were
inconceivable until recent millennia—too short a time for
evolution to expand the fundamental range of our purposeful concerns.