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One morning last fall, the evolutionary biologistRandy ! ornhill (http://biology.unm.edu/ ! ornhill/rthorn.htm) was standing with me in front of thegorilla enclosure at the Albuquerque zoo(http://www.cabq.gov/culturalservices/biopark/zoo). He was explaining a new theory about theorigins of human culture when Mashudu, a10-year-old western lowland gorilla, decided to helpillustrate a point. In a very deliberate way, Mashudusauntered over to the deep cement ravine at thefront of his enclosure, perched his rear end over theedge, and did his morning business.

Mashudu, I suspected, had just displayed whatevolutionary theorists call a behavioral immuneresponsea concept central to ! ornhills big

theory. So I asked him whether I was right about

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such instinctual behaviors to avoid infection andillness. Some of these habits very much parallelthose seen in other creatures. I admitted to! ornhill that I had recently been displaying a bit of grooming behavior myself a " er the youngestprimate in my care came home from preschoolitching with head lice. Like Mashudu, we humansremove waste from our living quarters. We ostracizeour sick, at least to the extent that we expect thosewith the u to stay home from work or school. Andsimilar to the lowly ant, we assign a small numberof our fellows the solemn duty of hauling away anddisposing of our dead. On examination, everydaylife is full of small defensive moves againstcontamination, some motivated by feelings, likedisgust, that arise without conscious reection.When you open the door of a gas station bathroomonly to decide you can hold it for a few more miles,or when you put as much distance as possiblebetween yourself and a person who is coughing andsneezing in a waiting room, you are displaying abehavioral immune response.

But these individual actions are just the tip of theiceberg, according to ! ornhill and a growing campof evolutionary theorists. Our moment-to-momentpsychological reactions to the threat of illness, theysuggest, have a huge cumulative e # ect on culture.Not only thatand heres where ! ornhills theoryreally starts to re the imaginationthese deepinteractions between local pathogens and human

social evolution may explain many of the basicdi# erences we observe between cultures. How doesyour culture behave toward strangers? What kind of government do you live under? Who are your sexualpartners? What values do you share? All of thesequestions may mask a more fundamental one: Whatgerms are you warding o # ?

! e threat of disease is not uniform around the

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world. In general, higher, colder, and drier regionshave fewer infectious diseases than warmer, wetterclimates. To survive, people in this latter sort of terrain must withstand a higher degree of pathogenstress. ! ornhill and his colleagues theorize that,over time, the pathogen stress endemic to a placetends to steer a culture in distinct ways. Researchhas long shown that people in tropical climates withhigh pathogen loads, for example, are more likely todevelop a taste for spicy food, because certaincompounds in these foods have antimicrobialproperties. ! ey are also prone to value physicalattractivenessa signal of health andimmunocompetence, according to evolutionarytheoristsmore highly in mates than people livingin cooler latitudes do. But the implications dontstop there. According to the pathogen stress theoryof values, the evolutionary case that ! ornhill andhis colleagues have put forward, our behavioralimmune systemsour group responses to localdisease threatsplay a decisive role in shaping ourvarious political systems, religions, and sharedmoral views.

If they are right, ! ornhill and his colleagues maybe on their way to unlocking some of the moststubborn mysteries of human behavior. ! eir theorymay help explain why authoritarian governmentstend to persist in certain latitudes whiledemocracies rise in others; why some cultures arexenophobic and others are relatively open to

strangers; why certain peoples value equality andindividuality while others prize hierarchicalstructures and strict adherence to tradition. Whatsmore, their work may o # er a clear insight into howsocieties change. According to ! ornhills ndings,striking at the root of infectious disease threats is byfar the most e # ective form of social engineeringavailable to any would-be reformer.

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If you were looking for a paradigm-shi " ing theoryabout human behavior, step right up. Once westarted looking for evidence that pathogens shapeculture, ! ornhill told me, we began to nd it indamn near every place we looked.

TTHHOORRNNHHIILLLL WWAASS SSTTEEEERREEDD TTOOWWAARRDD the topicof the human psychological reaction to disease inthe early 2000s by a young graduate student adviseenamed Corey Fincher (http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/psych/people/cncher/) . Fincher hadarrived at the University of New Mexico(http://www.unm.edu/) intending to study themating behavior of rattlesnakes. A " er a time,however, he instead became curious about theevolutionary e # ects of disease on human culturalbehaviorand particularly about the question of why cultures tend to fall along a spectrum betweenindividualist and collectivist dispositions.

Psychologists and other social scientists have longbeen curious about this robust di # erence betweenhuman populations. In strongly collectivistsocieties, group membership forms the foundationof ones identity. Sacricing for the common goodand maintaining harmonious ties with family and

kin are expected. By contrast, in stronglyindividualist societies like those of the UnitedKingdom, the U.S., Australia, and the Netherlands,individual rights are valued above duties to others.Ones identity does not derive from the group, butrather is built through personal actions andachievements. Although these di # erences havebeen conrmed by many cross-cultural studies in a

variety of di# erent ways, no one had come up with a

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convincing evolutionary theory to suggest why itwould be advantageous for one group of people tobecome more collectivist and another group tobecome more individualist.

Fincher suspected that many behaviors incollectivist cultures might be masks for behavioral

immune responses. To take one key example,collectivist cultures tend to be both morexenophobic and more ethnocentric thanindividualist cultures. Keeping strangers awaymight be a valuable defense against foreignpathogens, Fincher thought. And a strongpreference for in-group mating might help maintaina communitys hereditary immunities to local

disease strains. To test his hypothesis, Fincher setout to see whether places with heavier disease loadsalso tended toward these sorts of collectivist values.

Working with Damian Murray and Mark Schaller,two psychologists from the University of BritishColumbia, and ! ornhill, Fincher comparedexisting databases that rated cultural groups on theindividualist-collectivist spectrum with datacollected from the Global Infectious Diseases andEpidemiology Network(http://www.gideononline.com/) and other sources.! e team paid special attention to nine pathogens(including malaria, leprosy, dengue, typhus, andtuberculosis) that are detrimental to humanreproductive tness. What the team found was astrong correlation between collectivist values andplaces with high pathogen stress. In 2008, Fincher,! ornhill, Schaller, and Murray published a majorpaper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/) that laidout the connection.

! ornhill and Fincher found further evidence forthe pathogen stress theory by looking at

geographical regions that had not only severe


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disease stress but also a highly diverse patchwork of local pathogen populations. ! e critters that makeus illnot only the viruses and bacteria, but also theticks, ies, and mosquitoes that spread themaretiny and lack the ability to regulate their own heatas larger organisms do. ! ey o" en ourish only invery narrow climatic zones, where they are adaptedto certain temperature and moisture levels. As aresult, pathogen threats can be highly localized. Onestudy, for instance, found at least 124 geneticallydistinct strains of the parasite Leishmaniabraziliensis across Peru and Bolivia.

If you were to live in such a pathogenically diverseplace, you and your family would likely develop a

resistance or immunity to your local parasites. Butthat defense might be useless if you were to move inwith a group just a short distance awayor if astranger, carrying a foreign pathogen load, were toinsinuate himself into your clan. In such places,then, it would be important for neighboring groupsto be able to tell the di # erence between us andthem. With that thought in mind, ! ornhill and

his colleagues made a prediction: that regions witha balkanized landscape of localized parasites wouldin turn display a balkanized landscape of localizedcustoms and conspicuous cultural di # erencesamong human populationsdialects, uniquereligious displays, distinctive art and music, and thelike. While there is much more research to be done,early ndings suggest thatparticularly when it

comes to the development of local languages andreligionspathogen stress does appear to spawncultural diversity.

A set of more cautious researchers would likelyhave circled the wagons a " er unveiling their theoryand concentrated on building a body of evidence todefend their early claims. Having a novelexplanation for why some cultures are collectivist


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while others are individualist would probablyguarantee ones place in social science lore.! ornhill and Fincher, however, didnt stop for abreath. By the time the two published a major paperin Behavioral and Brain Sciences (https://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=BBS) in 2012, they hadmarshaled evidence that severe pathogen stressleads to high levels of civil and ethnic warfare,increased rates of homicide and child maltreatment,patriarchal family structures, and social restrictionsregarding womens sexual behavior. Moreover, thesepathogen-avoidant collectivist tendencies, theywrote, coalesce over time into repressive andautocratic governmental systems. Want tounderstand the rise of fascism, dictatorship, andethnocentric campaigns that dehumanizeoutsiders? Look to the prevalence of pathogenthreats. Over the years, scholars like William H.McNeill and Jared Diamond have argued that germsand geography exert an under-appreciatedinuence on the rise and fall of societies. But for! ornhill and Fincher, human psychologicaladaptations to the threat of disease are nothing lessthan the missing link in our understanding of culturea fundamental key to our collective valuesthat researchers and philosophers over humanhistory have overlooked.


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(http://d1435t697bgi2o.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/mosquito-feature.jpg) (Illustration: Tom

Cocotos)

Over the last few years, an increasing number of papers from other social scientists have backed thetheory. While many of these researchers work with

the same large data sets and long timescales thatFincher and ! ornhill study, others have gured outways to tease out the behavioral immune responsein real time, on a smaller scale. Schaller and hiscolleagues, for example, set up a test to see if disease cues could inuence laboratory subjectsopinions of foreigners. Schallers team had onegroup of subjects watch a slideshow about germs

and disease while another group watched a showabout everyday accidents and dangers. ! eresearchers then told the subjects that the Canadiangovernment was going to spend money to attractimmigrants to the country. As Schaller predicted,the test subjects who had been cued with thedisease presentation were less inclined to spendmoney to attract people from unfamiliar countries.

Many researchers remain unconvinced thatpathogen stress is as important at ! ornhill andFincher suggest. Voicing a common critique, theanthropologist Scott Atran has argued that! ornhill and Finchers make too precipitous a leapfrom correlation to cause in their analysis of data.Other critics have pointed to potentialcounterexamples to the pathogen stress theory: If


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strong religiosity is, as ! ornhill and Fincher claim,an adaptive response to pathogen stress, then whydo some religious people behave in suchpathogenically promiscuous waysengaging inblood rituals, circumcision, piercing or tattooing, ortromping o # to proselytize in strange lands? Stillother researchers have stepped in to suggest thatthe level of in-group preference in a culture can bebetter understood in relation to the quality andaccessibility of local governmental institutions: ! emore dependable the institutions, the less peoplehave to invest in their family and local groups tomeet basic needs.

During our

interview atthe zoo,! ornhillappearedneither boastful about his theory nor particularlydefensive about criticism. At 69 years old, he is thepicture of an avuncular, somewhat rumpledprofessor, happy to spin out his ideas. At this stage

in his career, he said, he no longer spends timeworrying that other social scientists are not yet onboard or that they think he may be overreaching. Heis fond of quoting Albert Einstein, who once said,the grand aim of all sciences is to cover the greatestnumber of empirical facts by logical deduction fromthe smallest number of hypotheses or axioms. Of course, grand hypotheses can be easy to come up

with: just eavesdrop outside any dorm-room door.! eories that actually explain broad patterns innature, ! ornhill acknowledges, are extremely rare.But he is convinced he has one of thoseextraordinary beasts by the tail. Other socialscientists, he tells me, will eventually catch up. (Heand Fincher are at work on a magnum opus abouttheir theory that they hope will be out within the

year.)


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! ornhill is no stranger to controversial theories.While he made his professional name in 1983 with agroundbreaking book called ! e Evolution of Insect Mating Systems (http://www.amazon.com/! e-Evolution-Insect-Mating-Systems/dp/1583484205) , he became something of a publicgure in 2000 by publishing a book, with theanthropologist Craig T. Palmer, entitled A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (http://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Rape-Biological-Coercion/dp/0262201259) .! eir argumentthat rape needed to be understoodas an evolved sexual strategy in malesew in theface of the politically correct view of the day: thatrape could only be seen as an pathological act of violence and control. Talk-show bookers loved theauthors controversial take, and ! ornhill gamelyran the gauntlet, even appearing on ! e Today Show to explain the theory.

Popular reaction to the idea was heated.Evolutionary behavioral theorists o " en struggleagainst the misapprehension that describing a

behavior as evolved is the same thing as justifyingit. ! ornhill was no exception. As much as he triedto be clear that he was not making an excuse forsexual assaults, he received a series of death threatson his answering machine, and one detractorapparently attempted to break into his home. ! euniversity assigned a campus police o $ cer to walkhim to and from class. ! ornhill, who even admirers

call an academic cowboy, was shaken but notcowed.

While the pathogen stress theory has not reached! e Today Show level of pop-culturalconsciousnessnor anywhere near the same levelof controversyit has certainly ru % ed featherswithin the social sciences. ! e scope of the theory isso broad, and its claims are so dramatic, that it


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treads on virtually everyones intellectual turf. Itreally crosses disciplines, ! ornhill admitted.Economics, political science, psychology,anthropology. Each of these elds has di # erentassumptions about how culture works and howtheyve come to be like they are. For that reason, it issometimes very hard to break into those inter-disciplinary debates. You just have to hope that theevidence will win out.

SSOOMMEE AACCAADDEEMMIICCSS HHAAVVEE SSUUGGGGEESSTTEEDD thatwhile the pathogen stress theory might help explainsome of the deep origins of human history, it haslittle relevance to the modern era. Indeed, in muchof the developed world today, major pandemics and

many historically common infectious diseases arelargely a thing of the past. Chronic conditions likediabetes, cancer, obesity, and heart disease are byfar the largest health concerns. Walk into anAmerican hospital su # ering from malaria or themeasles and you will more than likely be regardedas an oddity; its quite possible that no one on thesta # will have any personal experience treating

your condition.

But in ! ornhill and Finchers view, its not just thethreat of infection that shapes culture. ! e absenceof disease threats, they argue, creates a di # erent setof cultural conditions that, taken together, are thenecessary precursors to modernity. Collectivistvalues, despite their potential e # ectiveness atfencing out disease, come at a steep cost to thecultures that harbor them. As ! ornhill explained tome, keeping strangers at arms length can limit tradeand stymie a cultures acquisition of useful newtechnologies, materials, and knowledge.

So, as humans moved into drier and colder and lessdisease-ridden climates, ! ornhill says, they likelydiscarded their costly xenophobic disease-avoidant

ways and became less beholden to tradition, more


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willing to trade with others, and more accepting of technological innovations. Instead of censuring theindividual maverick thinker in the group, societieseventually came around to rewarding those whochallenged convention. With those changes camethe rise of wealth and the spread of education to alarger and larger segment of the population. ! emore educated the population, the more peopledemanded participation in their governments.Democracies, premised upon the rights andfreedoms of individuals, were the natural outcome.

Moreover, the democratizing e # ect of loweringdisease threats, they argue, can happen quitequicklyeven within a generation. Freedom House

(http://www.freedomhouse.org/) , an organizationthat tracks governments, civil liberties, voterparticipation, and equality around the globe,considers 46 percent of all countries to be freetoday, as opposed to just 29 percent in 1972.! ornhill points out that this rise coincided with anera in which major health interventions, includingvaccine programs, the chlorination of drinking

water, and e # orts to reduce food-borne disease,became commonplace in many parts of the world.! ornhill is not shy about the implications. If promoting democracy and other liberal values is onyour agenda, he says, health care and diseaseabatement should be your main concern.

OONNCCEE YYOOUUBBEECCOOMMEEAAWWAARREE of thepathogenstress theory,it has a kind of earwormish power. Even the mostobvious counterexamples that spring to mind can,on closer inspection, seem to o # er oblique and evensurprisingly overt support for some version of the


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pathogen stress theory. Its rather conspicuous thatNazi Germanyprobably the most famous modernexample of an ethnocentric, bellicose, authoritarianregimearose in a northern clime, and not in sometropical latitude. But consider that the Nazi partybegan its rise to power in the a " ermath of a Spanishu pandemic that had killed over two millionpeople across Europeover half a million inGermany alone. And remember that much of Hitlers poisonous rhetoric specically suggestedthat Jews were disease carriers. Again and again, hisrants portrayed Germany as an organism ghtingdiseasecaused, among other things, by Jewishbacteria. Did Hitler manage to manipulate anunknown psychological mechanism that had beentriggered by the threat of disease in the Germanpopulation?

! ere are several disquieting aspects to Fincher and! ornhills theory. Fincher is careful to say up frontthat their hypothesis is not meant to telegraph value judgments or guidance, but its hard not see thepathogen stress theorys distinction between

collectivist and individualist societies as a kind of politically charged, world-historical morality play.On one hand you have collectivist cultures rife withxenophobia, racism, adherence to authority, andrestrictive religions. On the other side are liberalcultures that promote equality, open-mindedness,democracy, and the acceptance of outsiders. One setof cultural values is a psychological defense against

sickness; the other, a logical extension of life in ahealthy society. In this light, the pathogen stresstheory can seem to o # er evolutionary justicationfor the cultural values that ! ornhill and Fincherthemselves espousea reminder, some might say,that not only history, but science as well, is writtenby the victors. But for his part, ! ornhill is condentin the evidence underlying his theory, and relatively

untroubled by the implications. If you increase


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health then people will become more liberal andhappier, he told me at the zoo. I dont think that isa bad idea.

! e pathogen stress theory is also hard to swallowin a way that evolutionary psychology argumentso" en areespecially for those who fancy the idea

that we are in control of our thoughts, emotions, andbehaviors. ! e next time someone tells you abouttheir religious beliefs, try convincing them theirrmly held convictions spring from an unconsciousdisease-avoidance mechanism. Or, alternatively, trytelling a liberal acquaintance that their beliefsabout openness and inclusion are only as deep asthe good luck that has allowed them to live in a

relatively disease-free zone.It is true that the pathogen threat theory doesntintegrate with the profundity we feel when we talkabout values, ! ornhill admitted while eating asandwich at the zoo cafe. When we think about ourreligious or political beliefs we feel like wevedecided on them. ! ey dont feel like a defenseagainst disease. ! ey feel like something moremeaningful. ! ey feel like the truth.

! ornhill and Finchers analysis takes such asatellite view of humanityderiving its insightsfrom vast data setsthat it can feel alien and cold.! ornhill started his career as a behavioral ecologiststudying insects, and his perspective on humanpopulations can at times seem every bit as distant

as his perspective on the anonymous populations of bugs he once investigated. ! ere is, however, atleast one respect in which ! ornhills researchcomes down to a deeply personal, human scale.

! ornhill grew up in Alabama in the 1940s and 50s.He says he witnessed rsthand the rank sexism,racism, and xenophobia that was rampant in theSouth during that period. And he is well acquainted


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with the regions strong family ties and rmreligious beliefs. But he is also aware of a somewhatlesser known set of facts about his native soil.Around the time of his childhood, Southern stateswere nally getting a hold on a pair of diseases thathad long plagued the region: malaria andhookworm. ! ese diseases, writes Peter Hotez, thefounding dean of the National School of TropicalMedicine (http://www.bcm.edu/education/schools/national-school-of-tropical-medicine/) at BaylorUniversity, had turned generations of Southernersinto anemic, weak, and unproductive children andadults. Not surprisingly, ! ornhill believes that thecollectivism of the old Souththe adherence totradition, ethnocentrism, and suspicion of outsidersthat marked his childhoodstemmed from itshistorically high pathogen load.

Similarly, he attributes the progress hes seentoward a more egalitarian South to the alleviation of the regions most pernicious health problems. Youstill hear people say that the old South will riseagain, but I doubt it has a chance unless disease

prevalence goes up dramatically, he says. Maybe if you knock out all the sewage treatment plants andstop giving antibiotics to sick kids, it would have achance.

As fortune would have it, the United States mayhave just embarked on a natural experiment to test! ornhill and Finchers pathogen stress theory.Conservatives (with their collectivist valuesemphasizing religion, tradition, and regionalism)and liberals (with their individualist values of openness, anti-authoritarianism, andexperimentation) have spent the better part of 10years now manning their battle lines over the issueof universal access to health insurance coverage. If ! ornhill and Fincher are right, conservatives mayhave had more reason to oppose the A # ordable


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Care Act than they currently understand. Might ane# ective health intervention such as Obamacaremove the country, on some deep psychological level,away from conservative values and toward moreliberal ones? Is it possible that there are utterlyunacknowledged stakes in this battle?

!ornhill has pondered these questions privately.

While hes not sure whether Obamacare is strongenough medicine to move the dial signicantly interms of disease levels, he is certain that the moste# ective way to change political values fromconservative to liberal is through health-careinterventions and advances in providing cleanwater and sanitation. ! at is clearly the conclusion

that the bulk of evidence supports, ! ornhill says.If you lower disease threats in countries theybecome more liberal, and that is true for states inthis country. ! e implication is that if youe# ectively target infectious diseases then you willliberalize the population.

At the same time, well beyond the borders of theUnited States, the coming decades may supply awholly di# erent test of the pathogen stress theory.Higher temperatures, elevated sea levels, andincreased precipitation in some areasall predictedto accompany climate changeare expected tobring tropical diseases to higher latitudes andelevations in the coming decades. Pathogens thatonce perished in cold climates and dry soils maynd new congenial zones of heat and moisture, andnew host populations. Incidents of dengue fever inthe U.S., for example, are expected to spread beyondHawaii and the Mexican borderlands as climatechange creates expanding habitats for the mosquitothat carries the virus. Unless e # ective healthinterventions ward o # these new threats, humans inever higher latitudes may again have to resort totheir embedded psychological and cultural


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