Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

THE SETI PROJECT is the largest in the world devoted to communicating with intelligent life forms outside of those on Earth. A branch of SETI has brought together anthropologists, mathematicians, physicists, and media and communication experts to solve an intriguing problem: Which symbols should we send out into the infinite expanse of the universe to communicate the altruistic capacities of the human species? Assuming other intelligent life-forms emerged in similar carbon-based chemical processes as we did, how might we, given one shot, communicate our capacity for good to other intelligent minds? The yin-yang symbol? An image of a baby, with round eyes, small mouth, and minuscule mound of a chin? Perhaps, instead, we should rely on sound, given our powerful capacity to communicate vocally. How about the perfect laugh, a soothing sigh, a meditative oohmmmm, or coos between infant and parent?

The question that SETI scholars are debating mirrors one at the heart of this chapter: As our hominid predecessors increasingly lived and worked in close proximity with one another, gathering and distributing plants, fruits, and seeds, sharing the meat of a kill, tending to the needs of vulnerable offspring, moving through gatherings of potential mates and vigilant rivals, what behaviors allowed them to navigate such conflict-rife contexts in cooperative fashion? The classical Greeks had their own answer, one that will anticipate the theme of this chapter—the smile.

As Angus Trumble details in A Brief History of the Smile, in the third to fifth centuries BC, Greek artisans began sculpting the Kouros, a life-sized sculpture that has been found throughout mainland Greece, Asia Minor, and islands in the Aegean Sea. It is a sublimely dynamic sculpture, with upright posture, left foot moving forward, and hands gently clenched in determination. The most captivating aspect of the Kouros, though, is its smile. It is at once modest, poised, expectant, and brimming with contained delight.

In its heyday, the Kouros served as an all-purpose symbol of goodness. It was commonly placed in ceremonial settings as an offering to the gods, to communicate reverence toward the higher powers that controlled the quirks of fate on the earthly ground of Greek life. It was a common presence at funerals, no doubt for those well-off enough to afford such memorializing, serving as an image of the deceased and as a symbol of the gods who would protect the soul of the deceased. For the Greeks, the Kouros represented the soul embodied in the human form.

Evolutionary analysis will tell a similar story about the human smile. In evolution’s toolbox of adaptations that promote cooperation, the smile is perhaps the most potent tool. The smile is visible from hundreds of feet. It triggers, science has discovered, activation in reward centers of the brain. It soothes the stress-related physiology of smiler and perceiver alike. The smile smoothes the rough edges of our social life, creating a medium of benevolent exchange. The right kind of smile brings the good in others to completion. It is one of the first acts of jen in primate evolution.

At stake in our evolutionary analysis of the smile are answers to two questions. The first is straightforward, but has proven to be a surprisingly prickly source of controversy: What does the smile mean? People smile in almost every imaginable context: seeing a loved one, being sentenced to prison, enjoying ice cream and the appalling cooking of a dear friend, hearing that one is pregnant and receiving dire medical news, winning lotteries and losing Olympic competitions. The English language possesses a few words for smiles—“smile,” “grin,” “smirk,” “beam”—really a paucity of concepts that masks the rich complexity of the realm of smiles. A better understanding of what the smile means will be found by turning to facial anatomy and evolutionary analysis.

A deeper question, however, is at play in our search for the origins of the smile: What are the roots of human happiness? If the right kind of smile is synonymous with happiness, which intuition and dozens of scientific studies suggest is the case, then our search back in time for the social contexts in which the smile emerged is really a search back in time for the origins of human happiness. And this journey would begin with Charles Darwin’s intuitions, and end in studies of smile-like behavior in our more egalitarian primate relatives.

MISLED BY THE LAUGHTER OF CHILDREN