But if humans act as they do mostly because of parental programming, why or how did some behaviour patterns ever become established in the first place in the earliest of human societies? And why did many behaviors obviously possible for humans vanish totally or never get tried at all? Why don’t most people on this planet eat Rowan berries or turn their children into slaves? The answer is obvious: the morés that help us to live are kept; the ones that don’t serve the needs of survival aren’t. We keep alive the morés that keep us alive.

The second step in the explanation of social morés and cultures is this: behaviour patterns become established in a society and passed on from generation to generation if they enable people to live individually and as a community, to reproduce, and to program the behaviours into their young. If new morés or behaviour patterns are to last, they must achieve these results at levels of efficiency at least as high as those the community knew before its people began to acquire the new behavior patterns. This is the theory around which is built the field of sociocultural evolution, a field of study that began to develop as a branch of science only in the twentieth century due to the work of people like sociologist Gerhard Lenski and anthropologists Leslie White and Marshall Sahlins.³

The gradual process of adoption of morés into the cultural code of a society is vital to the survival of the morés themselves. None of the phases in a society’s adopting a new more necessarily entails any of the others. A behaviour recently acquired by one person on a trial basis may make that individual healthier and/or happier, but this does not automatically mean he will reproduce more prolifically or nurture more effectively or teach his morés to his children more efficiently. Other factors can and do intervene.

Many examples can be cited as evidence to support this generalization. Some of the tribes in Indonesia taught every member of the community to go into the forest to defecate. The individual had to dig a hole in the earth, defecate in it, then cover the excrement with earth before returning to the tribe’s living spaces. Children were taught to hide their excrement so no hostile shaman would find it and use it to cast an evil spell on such a careless child.⁴

In the view of most of us in Western societies, the advantages of the practice lie in the reduced risk to the community of diseases such as cholera. Similar practices are taught to people in Western societies (and described in cultural codes as early as those found in the Old Testament of the Bible).

Orthodox Jews and Muslims have long been taught not to eat pork. What survival value lay in eating beef, chicken, and fish but not pork? The answer, from a scientific perspective, is that pigs for hundreds of years have been the main intermediary hosts carrying trichinosis to humans. The early Jews and Muslims did not know that such was the case; trichina eggs and worms are microscopic. But Jewish and Muslim communities nevertheless benefited over the long haul by eliminating pork from their diets.

For centuries, many Europeans drank large quantities of malt liquor, wine, and beer, and later, tea and coffee. This custom was based in tradition rather than religion, but its beneficial effect was felt just the same, since local water often contained dangerous bacteria. While the benefits were mixed because they were offset by the negative effects of alcohol and caffeine abuse, the important thing to see is that these people did not need to know anything about bacteria in order to arrive over generations, by trial and deadly error, at a set of behaviours that enabled them to survive in greater numbers over the long term. Of course, in China, the drinking of tea had been looked on as a healthful practice for both the individual and society for much, much longer.

                                   

Another example of the morés that guide our cultures can be found in a different area of life, in the laws of Moses. These instruct followers of the Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim faiths to “Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land that the Lord thy God hath given thee.” (Exodus 20:12) The faithful are instructed to care for, treat respectfully, and consult their parents (therefore, by a small logical extension, all citizens of the community should be cared for in their old age).

Honouring our elders means consulting with them on all kinds of matters. Before writing was invented, an old person was a walking encyclopedia to be consulted for useful information on treatment of diseases and injuries, planting, harvesting, and preserving food, making and fixing shelters and tools, hunting, gathering, and much more. Knowledge and wisdom were passed down through the generations by oral means. By honouring elders, the people in a community preserved and thus had access to much larger stores of knowledge than if they had simply abandoned their elderly as soon as they became a net drain on the tribe’s physical resources. 

An elder’s knowledge often solved both small problems and major crises for the entire tribe. Over many generations, societies that respected and valued their elders gradually outfed, outbred, and outfought their competitors.

Imagine an elder in a primitive tribe. She might very well have said: “We have to boil the water. This sickness came once before, when I was seven summers old. Only people who drank soup and tea did not get sick. All who drank the water got sick and died.”

It is worth noting that the commandment in its original wording read, “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long …” and so on. “Thy” days, not “their” days. At first glance, this seems odd. If I honor my parents, they will likely enjoy a more peaceful and comfortable old age, but that will not guarantee anything about my own final years. By then, my parents, even if they are grateful folk, will most probably be long since dead. At that point, they can’t do much to reciprocate and so benefit me.

On closer examination though, we see that there is more here. As we treat our elders with respect in their last years, consult their opinions on a wide range of matters, include them in social functions, and so on, we model for our children behaviors that are imprinted on them for a lifetime, and they, in turn, will practice these same behaviors in twenty years or so. The commandment turns out to be literally true.

Note also that there is a deep and complex relationship between our morés or patterns of behavior and our values programming. The common behavior patterns in a culture, patterns that we call morés, are just ways of acting out in the physical world beliefs that are held deep inside the individual’s mental world, beliefs about what kinds of behaviors are consistent with the individual’s code of right and wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, sensible or silly. More on these matters as we go along.