I spent the summer of 2011 as an undergraduate researcher at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, in Colorado. My job was to collect burying beetles—necrophagous critters with wing cases the colors of Halloween—using traps made out of coffee cans and chicken flesh. Behavioral biologists are fascinated by burying beetles because of their biparental model of care: males and females prepare meaty balls from carcasses and then coöperatively raise larvae on them. I was a matchmaker, charged with setting up pairs of beetles and watching them co-parent.
That summer was a dream. I lived in a community of more than a hundred scientists, students, and staff. The research station, based at the site of a deserted mining town, was a magnet for weirdos and plant lovers, naturalists and marmot chasers, flower people and climate watchers. It consisted of dozens of cabins—some Lincoln Log style and more than a century old, others retrofitted into modern laboratories—encircled by spruce and aspen forests, montane meadows, and monumental peaks. I was more accustomed to sidewalks than to summits, but now I saw elk and black bears and woke up one night to a porcupine gnawing on my cabin. For the first time in my life, I found love, or something close to it. In spare moments, I retired to my room, where I drew and wrote in my journal. On the weekends, we scaled the Rockies.
A part of me wanted that summer to be my forever. I envisioned a career as a collector of coleopterans, sneaking off to the mountains to cavort and observe. Another part of me worried that I was being frivolous. Back in college, my classmates had high-minded ambitions like fighting climate change, becoming human-rights lawyers, and starting microfinance firms to alleviate poverty. To spend time with books and beetles in wildflower country seemed the pinnacle of self-indulgence. Adding to the internal tension was something I’d observed among my beetles: the spectre of evolved selfishness. What looked like coöperation was, I discovered, laced with sexual conflict. The female beetles, when they had a size advantage, ejected their male partners; the males evidently stuck around less to help than to insure future mating opportunities. Where I first saw biparental collaboration was instead a complicated waltz of organisms seeking to perpetuate their own interests. Was I one of them—another gene machine bent on favoring itself?
I had, to that point, considered myself a mostly decent person, moved by empathy and committed to self-expression. Was all this actually vanity and delusion, selfishness masquerading as morality? The prospect was unsettling. So I hid away in a one-room library that smelled faintly of old textbooks and the alcohol used to preserve animal specimens, and there I started to work out a response. We’re evolved organisms, I figured, but we’re also an intelligent, cultural species capable of living by ideals that transcend our egoistic origins. What emerged from my musings was a personal ideology, at the core of which was an appreciation of creation—including artistic and scientific work. Even an awkward scribble, I supposed, expresses an incomprehensibly epic causal history, which includes a maker, the maker’s parents, the quality of the air in the room, and so on, until it expands to encompass the entire universe. Goodness could be reclaimed, I thought. I would draw and write and do science but as acts of memorialization—the duties of an apostle of being. I called the ideology Celebrationism, and, early in 2012, I started to codify it in a manic, sprawling novel of that name.
I had grown up a good Sikh boy: I wore a turban, didn’t cut my hair, didn’t drink or smoke. The idea of a god that acted in the world had long seemed implausible, yet it wasn’t until I started studying evolution in earnest that the strictures of religion and of everyday conventions began to feel brittle. By my junior year of college, I thought of myself as a materialist, open-minded but skeptical of anything that smacked of the supernatural. Celebrationism came soon after. It expanded from an ethical road map into a life philosophy, spanning aesthetics, spirituality, and purpose. By the end of my senior year, I was painting my fingernails, drawing swirling mehndi tattoos on my limbs, and regularly walking without shoes, including during my college graduation. “Why, Manvir?” my mother asked, quietly, and I launched into a riff about the illusory nature of normativity and about how I was merely a fancy organism produced by cosmic mega-forces.
After college, I spent a year in Copenhagen, where I studied social insects by day and worked on “Celebrationism” the rest of the time. Reassured of the virtue of intellectual and artistic work, I soon concluded that fictional wizards provided the best model for a life. As I wrote to my friend Cory, “They’re wise, eccentric, colorful, so knowledgeable about some of the most esoteric subjects, lone wolves in a sense, but all of their life experience constantly comes together in an exalting way every time they do something.” When, the following year, I started a Ph.D. in human evolutionary biology at Harvard, I saw the decision as in service of my Celebrationist creed. I could devote myself to meditating on the opportune swerves that produced us.
I was mistaken. Celebrationism died soon afterward. Just as observation and a dose of evolutionary logic revealed male burying beetles not as attentive fathers but as possessive mate guarders, the natural and behavioral sciences deflated my dreamy credo, exposing my lofty aspirations as performance and self-deception. I struggled, unsuccessfully, to construct a new framework for moral behavior which didn’t look like self-interest in disguise. A profound cynicism took hold.
Skepticism about objective morality is nothing new, of course. Michel de Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, remarked that “nothing in all the world has greater variety than law and custom,” a sign, for him, of the nonexistence of universal moral truths—and he had predecessors among the ancient Greeks. David Hume chimed in, two centuries later, to argue that judgments of right and wrong emanate from emotion and social conditioning, not the dispassionate application of reason. Even the more pious-sounding theorists, including Kant and Hegel, saw morality as something that we derive through our own thinking, our own rational will. The war between science and religion in the nineteenth century brought it all to a head, as a supernatural world view became supplanted by one that was more secular and scientific, in a development that Nietzsche described as the death of God. As the pillars of Christian faith crumbled, Western morality seemed poised to collapse. Nihilism loomed. “But how did we do this?” the madman in Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science” asks. “How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun?”
Nietzsche’s response to a godless world was a moral makeover: individuals were to forge their own precepts and act in accordance with them. More than a century later, such forays have matured into an individualist morality that has become widespread. We behave morally, we often say, not because of doctrine but because of our higher-order principles, such as resisting cruelty or upholding the equality of all humans. Rather than valuing human life because an omnipotent godhead commands it, or because our houses of worship instruct it, we do so because we believe it is right.
At its core, this view of morality assumes a kind of moral integrity. Although some people may embrace principles for self-interested ends, the story goes, genuine altruism is possible through reasoned reflection and an earnest desire to be ethical. I told myself a version of this story in the Rockies: rummage through your soul and you can find personally resonant principles that inspire good behavior. The Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg turned a model like this into scholarly wisdom in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, positioning it as the apex of the six stages of moral development he described. For the youngest children, he thought, moral goodness hinges on what gets rewarded and punished. For actualized adults, in contrast, “right is defined by the decision of conscience in accord with self-chosen ethical principles appealing to logical comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency.”
All this may sound abstract, but it is routine for most educated Westerners. Consider how moral arguments are made. “Animal Liberation Now” (2023), the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer’s reboot of his 1975 classic, “Animal Liberation,” urges readers to emancipate nonhuman animals from the laboratory and the factory farm. Singer assumes that people are committed to promoting well-being and minimizing suffering, and so he spends most of the book showing, first, that our actions create hellish existences for many of our nonhuman brethren and, second, that there is no principled reason to deny moral standing to fish or fowl. His belief in human goodness is so strong, he admits, that he expected everyone who read the original version of his book “would surely be convinced by it and would tell their friends to read it, and therefore everyone would stop eating meat and demand changes to our treatment of animals.”
From an evolutionary perspective, this could seem an odd expectation. Humans have been fashioned by natural selection to pursue sex, status, and material resources. We are adept at looking out for ourselves. We help people, yes, but the decision to give is influenced by innumerable selfish considerations, including how close we are to a recipient, whether they’ve helped us before, how physically attractive they are, whether they seem responsible for their misfortune, and who might be watching. A Martian observer might, accordingly, have expected Singer’s arguments to focus less on the horrific conditions of overcrowded pig farms and instead to appeal to our hedonic urges—more along the lines of “Veganism makes you sexy” or “People who protest animal experimentation have more friends and nicer houses than their apathetic rivals.”
But Singer has always known his audience. Most people want to be good. Although “Animal Liberation Now” is largely filled with gruesome details, it also recounts changes that growing awareness has spurred. At least nine states have passed legislation limiting the confinement of sows, veal calves, and laying hens. Between 2005 and 2022 in the U.S., the proportion of hens that were uncaged rose from three per cent to thirty-five per cent, while Yum! Brands—the owner of such fast-food franchises as KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut, with more than fifty thousand locations around the world—has vowed to phase out eggs from caged hens by 2030. These changes are a microcosm of the centuries-long expansion of moral concern that, throughout much of the world, has ended slavery and decriminalized homosexuality. Could there be a clearer instance of genuine virtue?
I wasn’t yet thinking about any of this when I started graduate school. Instead, my mind was on monkeys. I had proposed studying the Zanzibar red colobus, a creature notable for retaining juvenile traits like a short face and a small head into adulthood. Our species underwent a similar juvenilization during our evolution, and the hope was that something might be learned about our past by studying this peculiar primate.
Still, I couldn’t read about monkeys all day. To start a Ph.D. at a major research university is to have proximity to countless intellectual currents, and I began to drift through the scholarly worlds on campus, which is how I found Moshe Hoffman. Moshe is intense. A curly-haired game theorist with a scalpel-like ability to dissect arguments and identify their logical flaws, Moshe was raised in an Orthodox Hasidic community in Los Angeles. He grew up wearing a kippah and spending half of each school day studying the Talmud and other religious texts until, at the age of fifteen, he forsook his faith. He had a chance conversation with an atheist classmate, then picked up Richard Dawkins’s “The Selfish Gene.” The book exposed him to game theory and evolutionary biology, setting him on a lifelong quest to solve the puzzles of human behavior.
