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We want to believe that there are others we always would. But how can we be sure? What are our limits? Do we have limits?

The answer lies with the Ten Types of Human: the people we become when we are faced with life’s most difficult decisions. But who or what are these Types? Where do they come from? How did they get into our head?

The Ten Types of Human is a pioneering examination of human nature. It looks at the best and worst that human beings are capable of, and asks why. It explores the frontiers of the human experience, excavating the forces that shape our thoughts and actions in extreme situations. It begins in a courtroom and journeys across four continents and through the lives of some exceptional people in search of answers.

Mixing cutting-edge neuroscience, social psychology and human rights research, The Ten Types of Human is at once a provocation and a map of our hidden selves. It provides a new understanding of who we are – and who we can be.

About the Author

Dexter Dias QC is a barrister who as Queen’s Counsel has been instructed in some of the biggest cases of recent years involving human rights, murder, terrorism, crimes against humanity and genocide. He has been instrumental in changing the law to better protect young women and girls at risk of FGM and works pro bono internationally with survivors of modern-day slavery, human trafficking and violence against women and girls.

He is also a prize-winning scholar of Cambridge University, having been elected to a Foundation Scholarship at Jesus College and winning the Lopez-Rey Prize for the highest Distinction in his research degree at the Faculty of Law’s Institute of Criminology, where he critically analysed the use of state coercive force on vulnerable young people in custody. He has researched and given lectures at Cambridge and held a visiting research residency at Harvard. He has addressed major international conferences and spoken on many national platforms around human rights and social justice issues and violence against women and girls. He chaired and co-wrote the influential Bar Human Rights Committee Report to the Parliamentary Inquiry into FGM and significantly contributed to changing the law to strengthen the national protective mechanism. His research was cited in Parliament and paid tribute to for its critical analysis of the defects in the UK’s rights protections. He has written reports to the United Nations, briefed the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls and advised parliamentarians in both the Commons and Lords.

He acts as governor, ambassador and advisor in respect of several human rights NGOs, sits as a part-time judge in the Crown Court (including at the Old Bailey), and is authorised to try Serious Sexual Offence cases. He was finalist in Liberty and JUSTICE’s prestigious Human Rights Lawyer of the Year Award and won the TMG Award for Outstanding Contribution to Advocacy and Justice.

FROM THE AUTHOR

THE BOOK YOU are about to read is part of a project to forge a new understanding of who we are and who we can be. It is based on research that began ten years ago and that has been conducted on four continents. It is also grounded in my work as a human rights lawyer. But the project would not have been possible without the participation, collaboration and generous contribution of a great number of people, many of who appear in the course of the text. Later in the book I pay proper tribute to them and explain the distinctive nature of their indispensable contribution. There I also acknowledge my deep gratitude to the friends and colleagues who have been instrumental in facilitating this endeavour. However, at the outset I must acknowledge the advice and support of close colleagues at the University of Cambridge, especially Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe, Director of Research at the Centre for Community, Gender and Social Justice, which I am proud to be affiliated to, my academic collaborator Dr Caroline Lanskey at the Institute of Criminology, and Dr Nicola Padfield at the Faculty of Law. Equally, at Harvard I am particularly indebted to Professor James Sidanius, the William James Professor of Psychology and Director of the Intergroup Relations Lab, who offered me a residency as Visiting Researcher, Dr Mariska Kappmeier (my next door neighbour on the 14th floor), and Professor Joshua Greene, who kindly invited me to present elements of my research at his groundbreaking Moral Cognition Lab. I am also indebted to numerous colleagues in sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti and Central Asia, in London and New York, at UNICEF (especially the astounding Judith Léveillée and Sabrina Avakian) and at the Bar Human Rights Committee (particularly its Chair, Kirsty Brimelow QC, and my colleague on fighting FGM Zimran Samuel). However, it would be a serious omission not to point out that of the numerous people I’ve interviewed, followed, consulted, contested, travelled with and tormented, during the research for this book, only a small proportion actually appear in the text. Nevertheless my other correspondents, confrères, intellectual comrades and combatants have informed my thinking and approach and thus are present as well. A comprehensive list of those I can name appears at the end of the book. However, given the particular nature of this research inquiry, and while many people appear bearing their real names, others have necessarily had their names altered. In respect of several, identifying characteristics and certain circumstances have had to be changed. The reason has been to protect the participants – both in terms of protecting their privacy and in certain instances their personal security, or that of people closely connected to them. Some have been or remain at considerable risk. Others have had their lives threatened. Several have been hurt or injured. A few have taken great risks in telling what they have. They have done so in the hope that it will help others, an aspiration I share and one of the chief animating ideas of the book. Some are embarking on perilous ventures – among the great secret journeys of our age – across treacherous terrain frequented by treacherous people. Others are returning to dangerous countries or regions acknowledged by international agencies to be hazardous and unsafe. Therefore I make it plain that where necessary, as in the unforgettable Love’s Executioner by Irvin Yalom, I have endeavoured to create an impenetrable ‘disguise’ (to use Yalom’s apt phrase). In some cases, as in his book, the best course to safeguard the identity of the participant has been to make what Yalom calls ‘symbolic substitutions’ or to ‘graft’, as he puts it, one person’s background or identity onto another’s, an approach also used by Barack Obama in respect of certain characters in Dreams from My Father. In making such elisions, I have sought to preserve what the great Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat calls ‘ the essential “feeling” of their lives’. Where this has been done it is because it has been the only way to ensure that their privacy and personal safety are maximally protected. Thus this book contains the full spectrum of material, from accounts that appear with names and essential details listed as they occurred, to those where there has had to be some or a substantial degree of disguise, to those where accounts have been blended or collaged. In the latter case, my solution has been to create connecting material and endeavour to develop a different kind of writing, melding fictive with non-fiction elements. Throughout, dialogue has had to be redacted for reasons of confidentiality or sensitivity; some dialogue has been modified, reconstructed from memory, condensed or paraphrased for length, or deduced for continuity or coherence from accounts of events provided. I have tried to convey the sense of accents and modes of speech and where – as frequently occurred – discussion took place in more than one language, I have usually (but not always) simplified it into one. Where participants have communicated dialogue or scenes with third parties, I have endeavoured to reconstruct them as authentically as possible and in the spirit of the overall narrative. Where there are gaps in the account or for reasons of confidentiality and/or security I have had to find a substitute, my approach has been informed by that of John Berendt in the seminal Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which is to combine the ‘strict non-fiction’ (his term) with elements constructed with the intention of remaining, as Berendt puts it, ‘faithful to the characters and to the essential drift of events’, but those are acts, it is essential to emphasise, that necessarily draw on both the inquisitional and imaginative faculties, concisely described by John le Carré (in a different context) as an exercise in ‘blending experience with imagination’. Thus some parts are necessarily a fictive reimagining of certain events grounded in the best available evidence. When done, this has been with the clear objective of protecting the personal safety of a contributor or preserving their privacy. The non-scientific narratives are based on what people have said about their lives. This is not an exercise in investigative journalism, nor an official inquiry. That would be a different book. Interesting, but different. Instead it contains accounts of how people have thought and talked about their lives and an attempt to convey what those lives are like. What is elevated to centre stage in this inquiry is what Oliver Sacks in Awakenings calls the ‘landscapes of being in which these [people] reside’ necessitating ‘an active exploration of images and views … and imaginative movement’ (his emphasis). Thus I have explored developing a somewhat different type of book, blending science with narrative, non-fiction with fictive elements. This is not the place for an epistemological (or any other) disquisition, but I should observe that my approach has also been heavily influenced by two of the foremost critical thinkers of the last 30 years, Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant (including invaluable correspondence with the latter, particularly in relation to my Cambridge research), and their advocacy of an active and immersive engagement with the subject. You will find references and suggestions for further reading in the Methodology section of the Note on Sources at the end of the book. Due to the text’s length, the full referencing can be found at the book’s dedicated page at the penguin.co.uk website. I should also state that I am an adherent of a critical school of thought that considers social forces and the social construction of both the individual and society as extraordinarily important. But I am also persuaded that there is something more in addition to and combining intricately with those already intricate processes. This book seeks to explore (but does not claim to resolve) that entanglement. Put simply: both nature and nurture are important. Our behaviour is not biology or environment, genetic inheritance or social learning, but both – and our social learning mechanisms are in any event probably shaped by evolution. The approach and moral stance of this book are a world away from ‘social Darwinism’ – in fact, they strenuously oppose it. Evolution is a fact, not a value. Therefore the book aims to lend itself to the project luminously articulated by philosopher Peter Singer: the reclamation of the penetrating explanatory power of Darwin’s thought for progressives. Very occasionally (rarely) there are biographical sketches that rely entirely on secondary sources. In such cases, all the originating source documents are cited in the reference section. Several thought experiments or hypotheticals appear in the book. They are entirely fictional except where the text refers to a particular case or event that has informed them. This book is based on research that began nine years ago and that has extended to four continents; it is also grounded in my practice as a human rights lawyer for over 25 years. Where protective measures have been adopted, they have been the ones wished for by the contributor. I am indebted to them all, not least for their companionship in the mound of months I was away, in the dust of every astounding, eye-opening day. They have been and remain the very heart and life pulse of the book.

PROLOGUE

SOME BOOKS BEGIN with an idea, others with an event. This book is of the latter kind. The event that triggered the book took place in a quiet corner of rural England, with a name that conjures shaded streams, gently running with water: Rainsbrook. That place was a prison. The event was the death of a child.

A small boy – he is 4 foot 10, weighs 6½ stone – pads along a corridor in silence. My view is from a high CCTV camera on a metal stanchion on a smoothed brick wall, black-and-white footage (it may not be, but that’s how I remember it), no sound, and the boy walks slowly with his back to me towards a room, which is his cell. He turns left, enters. I never see his face. Can you be haunted by a face you never see? He disappears, shuts the door. Minutes later, two prison officers walk, faster, along the same corridor. They walk in silence, but their sheer size compared to the boy seems to fill the frame with noise, with chaos. They also turn left, enter the room, shut the door. A third prison officer comes along, enters, shuts the door. Within minutes, the boy is dead. His name was Gareth Myatt.

It was my professional duty – it became my quest – to find out. On a day of pale blue March skies high above the crenulated towers of the Palace of Westminster, when I was appointed Queen’s Counsel, my thoughts kept turning to Gareth and his mother Pam. At the inquest into his death, during which I represented their family, Pam asked me a question: ‘Why did they do it – why did they do that to my son?’

I didn’t have an answer, or a good enough one for her. Truth in a courtroom is only part of human truth. She didn’t mean to affect me like that. She is a quietly courageous person who bears so much, wants to burden no one. What she really wanted was her son back. I couldn’t make that happen, but I could try to find a better answer. I took a sabbatical, went back to university. People did not understand. I’m not sure I did. But I was determined to find out what happened in that room.

You do the case. Finish it. Move on. But the case isn’t always finished with you. My ensuing investigation, for investigation it was – and mystery, and secret story – was in pursuit of an elusive fugitive: a culprit and quarry which was at the same time the hero of the piece – us. Or more precisely the hidden parts of us. It took me first to the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University. I was lured on by those few frames: a corridor, a boy disappearing, a door shutting, a question: what happened in that room?

When I continued my research at another place an ocean away, the labs of the Department of Psychology at Harvard, people asked ‘What are you doing?’ It was difficult to answer succinctly. I was tempted to say I want to know – we need to know – what happened in that room. I never said what I actually felt: I owed it to someone to find out.

In my mind, over time, Pam’s question slowly began to change. Not why did they do that, but why do we? A larger truth loomed behind what she asked. Why do we hurt the most fragile things? What are we? Who are we?

The quest in part was to save a boy it was impossible to save. I see that now. I was chided by an ominously named legal principle: the law of impossible attempts. This is an account of an attempt that was impossible. The data, the clues – the evidence – took me, over the next ten years, on a series of ‘journeyings’ (as Wittgenstein calls them) to four of the six humanly habitable continents and ranged from ancient Greece and imperial Rome, to modern southern Siberia and the ice mountains of Pluto. Again and again it was necessary to try to penetrate the inner recesses, the secret sanctuaries, of our brain. It resulted in my meeting people undaunted in the face of unimaginable conditions, people who have stolen, people who have killed, people who have spoken out at enormous personal risk, people who have performed feats of unimaginable heroism. And many, many others: people who, I am willing to wager, number among the most extraordinary we have. Remember this bet and hold me to it.

The more I researched the science and the far-flung frontiers of the human experience – the unguessable edges of what we know and what we are, of life and human longing – the more I realised that I was not just researching what happened in that room, that corridor, but in many. There are many such rooms and corridors in our mind. What is more, they are populated by a number of regularly recurring kinds of people. Types. In this book you will also meet them.

In a way, you already know them. Only you don’t – not really. You carry them around inside you. But you probably don’t know it. In a sense, they are you. Only they’re not – not entirely. They inform and shape the most important decisions in your life. But you’re almost certainly unaware of their intervention. They are the essence and instinct of the people you meet. They are the Ten Types of Human.

For years our brain was thought to function like a general-purpose computer, a little like an old-fashioned telephone system in those black-and-white movies, with everything going through a central switchboard. This view is being challenged. New findings in neuroscience and evolutionary biology indicate that the brain may be more intriguingly fragmented than that. Instead of a computer, the brain instead may be better understood as a series of highly specialised ‘modules’ – assemblages of banks of neurons and neurotransmitters and the connective pathways between them – each developed in response to specific adaptive problems or evolutionary goals. In other words, to help cope with certain key, recurring problems in human life. This is the concept of ‘modularity’.

Indeed the brain may not be just modular – it may be massively modular. It may possess many such mechanisms. In what follows, we’re going to restrict our focus. We’re going to focus on a select number of critical life problems and the processes we are equipped with to respond to them. We’re going to focus on ten.

Our brain is not immune to evolution. How it works today tells us as much about our ancestral past as the collections of bones of early humans scattered around the museums of the world. As biophysicist Max Delbrück said, ‘Any living cell carries with it the experience of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors.’ The modules that were relied upon for survival in millennia past still shape our lives in important ways. So:

The book examines ten problems that have haunted humanity, and ten types of characteristic human behaviours that can occur in response. Some of this behaviour will be instantly recognisable; some will be shocking. We shall see.

We are, it turns out, not entirely alone. We carry within us a number of evolved modules. We are, in important respects, an aggregation of the decisions these modules have informed. The concept of the ‘Type’ of human is an idea, a way of trying to understand a complex process. It is not a precise description of the world, but a way to think about it. As we’re going to see in the coming analysis, neuroscience and genetics are vitally important, but they do not provide a complete picture. Culture is also critical. We are unashamedly social beings. Our behaviour is influenced by where we are, what we are taught, what we learn, what we experience. Nurture matters. But so does biology.

But what do these Types do? Why do we still need them? And what do they tell us about human nature today?

I have been a human rights lawyer for over 25 years. My practice has been about carnage. The hidden parts of us that are the stuff of the book have significantly affected the triumph and tragedy of the human race. As Harvard professor E. O. Wilson states, ‘The worst in our nature coexists with the best’ – the ‘monster in the fever swamp’. This is not a new thought. In fact, it is almost our oldest. Sophocles saw it. In his imperishable Antigone he tells us, ‘Many things are both wonderful and terrible, but none more so than humans.’ We want to believe humankind is good, but we see so much wrongdoing – carnage – around us. Where does the truth lie? Each time the chaos comes it is new and very old.

Ultimately the book brings to bear the latest cutting-edge research science to offer a different way to think about these and a series of linked questions that flow from them: Why are we like this? Why do we do the things we do? What choice do we have? Who (or what) in the end does the choosing?

Let us begin to find out. For that, I will have to take you to another corridor – one in a school. But it is a very particular type of school. And I must introduce you to a person – a very particular type of person. The Kinsman.

The Kinsman

You come out of the coffee shop blinking in the late morning sunshine and you realise your mobile’s been on silent. You instinctively glance at its screen as you do one hundred times a day – must clean it properly. A text message arrives, then another, a flurry of them. You notice a series of missed calls. Something’s happened – but what? You begin to read the texts – they’re all telling you the same thing, the message horribly the same. The one you never dreamed you’d hear.

You hardly notice your coffee splashing over your shoes. A man is prowling around your child’s school. The man is armed with a gun.

You’re just a couple of streets away, you rush down there, but find that all is unnervingly quiet. Summer sunshine casts soft shadows of the schoolyard trees, a lone bird skims across the pale blue sky, but there on the periphery of your vision you see the door to the classrooms – kicked open. Two police officers sprawl on the concrete by the entrance, dead. The bird disappears into the treeline as you enter the corridor – the one with your daughter’s classroom. Then you hear them: shots in the next hallway.

You advance, more urgently now, until you glimpse through the glass in the classroom door the many traumatised pupils, wide-eyed, huddled together, hiding under tables. You try in vain to see your daughter. You can’t. You gesture to the children, but they’re frozen with fear. You are literally going to have to pull and drag them out. But where is your daughter? Then you hear heavy breathing, heavier footsteps – approaching. Heavy boots, a click, more: click, click, click … a gun being loaded. Time is running out. Suddenly you hear a voice from a broom cupboard by the exit, all the way back down the corridor: it cries your name. Your daughter. What do you do?

Do you abandon the class with the 24 children? Do you stay and try to defend them? At the far end of the corridor, your eyes fall on another body, a teacher who tried and failed to stop the gunman. Then another shape, sprawling, motionless – another teacher who met the same fate.

This could be about being heroic. All of us have the capacity for extreme courage. But if you confront the gunman, assume it’s certain that like the police officers and the two teachers before you, you will be killed. So confronting him will be futile: he will shoot you as he has shot them. He will shoot you then shoot all the children, including your daughter, but you will have tried to be heroic – and we all want to think of ourselves as heroic. But what other choices do you have? If you go to the class you can lead them out of the window to safety. If you go to your daughter, you will be able to get her out before the gunman arrives. There is just not time to do both.

So what do you do? It’s not easy. Something like this never is. But people in these situations have to make a choice. What’s yours?

Save the 24 innocent children of other decent parents or save a single child of your own. That is your dilemma. The worst of your life. Perhaps of anyone’s. But there it is.

You can hear the gunman’s footsteps approaching, the clicks of the weapon being primed, you can see the eyes of the children, you can hear the voice of your daughter calling you, beseeching you – what are you going to do?

You are probably experiencing a whirl of emotions. So to make things clearer, let me reduce your choice to three equations:

You Were Not Alone

I know what you would do. I know what you’d do because I would do the same. Because virtually everyone we know would do the same.

Imagine the choice is between your child and 50 children. Does that alter things? It must surely alter things: 50 lives for one. Below are 50 dots. Imagine each has a child’s name. I plucked some from a random name generator on the Internet.

Aston, Tiresias (the blind prophet of Thebes – it was random). Imagine each is the face of a different child.

What about 100 children? No change? What about 1,000 children? Twenty boxes full of dots, full of children? Still no.

What about one million – one thousand thousand other children – surely that changes your decision? Let us write it out in numbers so you can see the sheer magnitude of the lives at stake: 1,000,000 – all those noughts, that’s how many lives you can save, if only you give up one.

Still not enough? What if it were a choice between your child and a young brilliant scientist, and she’s stumbled on the vital breakthrough to curing cancer. But here’s the problem: she hasn’t yet had time to tell anyone about her world-altering discovery. Think of all the generations of unspeakable suffering and grief you will save. Or do you save your child? Can you live with the condemnation of the generations if you choose your child? Can you live with yourself if you don’t?

If it’s possible, step back. Think about what you’re seriously considering. You’re contemplating consigning generation after future generation to suffering the continuing blight of cancer, just to save one child. What would you do?

This is what the book is about. This and questions like it. The truth is that as you rushed down that corridor towards the broom cupboard, there is one fact you may not have realised:

The argument of this book is that with you at every step, in fact helping inform every step – to advance, retreat, waver – was the first of the Ten Types of Human that are the central subject-matter of what follows. You’ve just met the first one. Let’s give it a name – the Kinsman.

How did this character get into your head? What is it there for? What is it like? This book proposes that it is a psychological mechanism that has evolved over great stretches of our evolutionary past to respond to certain repeating life problems. Its functioning interacts with our learned behaviour, our socialisation. Thus nature and nurture connect and complicate. While you were in the school corridor you may have caught yourself saying that you ought to be doing one thing, but something deep inside you wants to do something else: to head to the classroom, to head back to the broom cupboard. You will find out much more about the Kinsman soon, but you already know something tremendously important: it will sacrifice dozens or even hundreds of other children – even a thousand – for just one of its own. We all want to protect our children. Everyone knows that. But do we really appreciate the frightening strength of that drive? How aware are we of the ruthless extent that it chooses our child over others? Why is it like this?

Did you ‘break’? This is the term we’ve pretty quickly settled on when I’ve spoken to groups about this problem. Did you reach a point at which you left your child? Some people – very few – break at 24. Far more when it gets to 50 other children. Many more find their breaking point is closer to 100. I have a friend who did not break even if the toll would be every single other child on the planet. Until she realised that she wanted a child for her daughter to play with – so everyone else minus one, that was her number. That friend (she’s still a friend) is a lawyer.

We all have a number. What’s yours? What do these numbers say about us? By our numbers shall we be known? These are the kind of questions this book is about. Questions and characters. Characters like the Kinsman. This has been just a brief introduction to one – the Kinsman will come again. But there are others of the Ten Types we must meet first. Like the subject of the next section: the Perceiver of Pain. Here they are in the order you will meet them:

But in order to understand the Ten Types, we must have examples. Thus in the following ten parts of the book – one for each Type – I triangulate my approach.

Firstly, we explore the mental modules involved, invoking the latest research in psychology and neuroscience.

Secondly, personal narratives, human stories from a number of exceptional people I’ve worked with and met, will show how the Types affect people in their everyday lives – and how these remarkable individuals have found ways to face and face down their more damaging effects.

Thirdly, a number of hypotheticals will offer you the opportunity to experience some of these mechanisms for yourself.

In this way I hope you will not only hear about the Types, but see them, feel them, and thus arrive at a richer answer to those core questions: Who are we? What are we? Who is inside us?

Therefore I hope that the coming pages will reveal why we are not what we think – and how this is a good thing. How it opens up intriguing possibilities for knowing ourselves in a new way and seeing the world differently. We will see a number of things that are not right with the world. The book will offer ways to challenge them. These solutions are grounded in the approach of Spanish philosopher Manuel Castells, who said that in order to challenge harmful power and its abuse, we must unveil its presence in the workings of our minds. This is the most essential mission of this book.

It offers a new examination of the nature of human nature. It is a quest. To look in a new way at how human beings hurt other human beings – and in doing so, to find ways to change this. Ultimately that is what The Ten Types of Human is about: finding fresh ways to be free.

Throughout my work on this book, I constantly kept close at hand an increasingly tattered news report about the boy I never met and could not save. Sometimes those few frames from the high CCTV camera would flicker in my mind; sometimes the screen would go blank, then slowly the picture would reassemble: a corridor, a boy disappearing from it, a door shutting, a question: what happened in that room?

It is true that I suffered captivity in the fortress of Yakub the Afflicted.

Richard Francis Burton, The Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860)

ONE

The Argument

THE TENSION YOU felt when agonising between protecting the 24 children in the classroom and saving your own child, was in part generated by an aspect of your mental make-up – a ‘Type’. The Kinsman. What are these Types? What do they consist of neurologically, functionally, practically in everyday life? What sort of a thing are they?

To understand, take a boy like Anthony.

‘Why do you want to talk to me?’ he asked. ‘I’m nobody.’

At the beginning, it’s true, my mastery of our language of mutual communication was too rusty to explain why I believed he had something crucial we needed to hear. My fault: I should have brushed up better. But I persevered. More accurately, he did. And here it is: the story of the boy who thought he was nobody. We met in an old shack, just close enough to the shore to feel the sea breeze, but which offered scant shade from the unsparing African sun. So Africa: the other side from those ancestral savannahs, but Africa nonetheless.

‘When it happened,’ he said, ‘I was doing nothing.’

A chicken wandered past our feet on vital business of its own. So: nobody doing nothing. How very promising. At the time he was talking about, a few years before, Anthony was 11 years old, and like many 11-year-olds he would do a great deal to get this one thing, the object of his desire. Although the world – and I mean the entire world – knows it as an iconic American product (it was conceived by Atlanta pharmacist John S. Pemberton in 1886), few realise that one of its constituents, the kola nut, is actually native to Africa. But at that precise point in his life, Anthony couldn’t care less: he would just give almost anything to get it. And that’s how it started: with Coca-Cola.

That first time we met, in a shack surrounded by boxing gyms and signs for Ovaltine and the Almighty’s undying love, near the Gulf of Guinea, near an old slaver fort (those things are connected), I was perplexed. Anthony reminds you of a ball. Not because he is round – he most certainly is not – but because like a rubber ball there is something elastic and durable about him. Something that bounces back; that’s had to. His greatest love is indeed boxing, and he finds it hard to stay still, forever bobbing and swaying as if constantly in some imaginary bout in the ring. He has limbs that look like linguine, but in fact are steel wire. He has big almond eyes. At times, later, when he was telling me what actually happened, his eyes would well up and he’d fight it, fight himself and everything he knows – too much for a teenaged boy to know: the strange underwater forests, the snakes (‘Les serpents, les serpents’), the day of rain and lightning, the body in the boat. But it started off joyously. With the chance of Coca-Cola.

Fictional depictions of human trafficking portray it as starting with predatory snatch squads, kidnapping, abduction. Sometimes it does. But other times it’s much more mundane. With Anthony it started by going to the local store. The shop was in his small town in Ghana. ‘My father sent me to the store,’ he said. Anthony and I communicate mainly in French – his mother is from the French-speaking country of Benin further along the coast; he had come to Ghana to be with his father.

After that first meeting, I wrote in my notebook:

Does he like me? Does he need to like me?

The British barrister, the boy from Benin.

He needs to trust me.

What’s trust?

At the shack near the seafront, Anthony told me, ‘You know, my father, he gave me money. He said I could buy a Coca-Cola.’

That day that changed his life was in the long, dry season and everyone was thirsty. It was as though the rain had forgotten how to come. Anthony went to the store to get a Coke. He never returned.

The story of Anthony you are about to read – why he never returned, what happened on the other side of that door – tells us something vital about one part of who we are. But right from the start, let me be clear about what the book is seeking to do: it will present an account of human nature. Not the account. An account.

We all have pet theories about human nature. As do all religions and political parties. Think of some of the truth claims produced by less gender-sensitive times:

All men are sinners. (Pet theory)

Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains. (Theory)

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. (Theory)

All animals are equal; some are more equal than others. (Counter-theory)

The Uber driver who conveyed me across Florida in an unnervingly militaristic Jeep (we’ll come to Florida in Part II), well, he had a very distinctive theory of human nature. It involved Donald J. Trump and people from the other side of the wall Trump says he wants to build. Thus this book is not offered to you as ‘the one and only Truth’. It is grounded in two things: scientific fact and scientific theory. A scientific theory is a wider kind of theory than the simple truth claims above. It is a series of propositions from which you can make predictions that are testable. The book’s prime theory is based on a mass of research science and converging lines of evidence in evolutionary biology, neuroscience and several branches of experimental psychology – what has been called a second Darwinian revolution. Our prime theory is as follows:

Theory #1

THE HUMAN MIND IS MODULAR

By this we mean that the architecture of the mind includes certain specialised, information processing, computational programmes. Same old brain; new way to understand it. A better way, a growing number of scientists now argue. Here is how the argument leads to and then flows on from that prime theory:

Our physical bodies have been shaped by evolution.
They consist of a series of highly specialised (adapted) components or organs.
The mind has also been shaped by evolution.
It also consists of a series of highly specialised components.
These components – or modules – have evolved when confronting certain repeating, real, highly relevant survival and reproductive challenges.

Propositions 1 and 2 are obvious to most people. So forgive me for not labouring them. If you are interested in them … actually, why shouldn’t you be? How many more interesting things are there than why life is – just is. Why there is life rather than non-life and this kind of life. To get at this, we’re blessed with Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life, a magisterial account of the stunning burgeoning of new life forms in the Precambrian. More recently, a concise but compelling addition to the evolution literature is Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True.

These works are backdrop, run-up to the wicket, advance battalions. In the pages that follow, the concept of evolution is so pervasively important that here is Coyne’s brief refresher:

Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.

This book does not seek to prove evolution. It examines its implications for the human mind. It does not provide an anatomical or physiological disquisition of the human body and its functional subunits or organs. Instead it considers how an equivalent functional specialisation may apply to our brain and thus our mind (approximately: what the brain does). So it uses Propositions 1 and 2 as building blocks. From them we infer what our mind might be like. It is an argument from analogy. We infer some qualities of the mind from how our physical bodies have been built and developed over time by genes. Some gene mutations were better, some worse for survival and reproduction. Microscopic advantages, when elongated over aeons, mattered greatly. Thus some arrangements survived, were reproduced, flourished and spread through populations in the grand and gruesome cosmic sorting process, the unsparing battle for existence in a world of scarcity and limit. And here we are. With our module-packed physical bodies. But what about our mind?

I first began to understand this because of Anthony. Shortly, I will return to him so you can see for yourself. But there is something else you need to know before we go to those underwater forests infested by water snakes and simultaneously grapple with the question posed in the single most famous case in English law: who is my neighbour – what duty do we owe to one another? First we must follow the overarching argument through and understand two things: the evolved mind and modularity. Then we will go to the lake that is not a lake and meet children who, in almost every way, are not children. One of them is Anthony.

Thus we come to Proposition 3: the evolved mind.

The argument from analogy is supported by a growing mass of evidence that the mind has also been shaped by this same process of cosmic sorting – evolution by natural selection. Indeed, the evidence and research you will read in this book supports this plank of the argument. But nonetheless I invite you to read the material with an open mind and reach your own conclusion. Darwin foresaw these developments about the human mind. As he drew his world-changing Origin of Species to a conclusion, he wrote that

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. (my emphasis)

Yes: mental powers acquired by gradation – by gradual, incremental change. Evolution by natural selection. A simple question puts the point. If almost everything about our physical being has evolved, why not our brain? The brain has billions of neurons: nerve cells that carry and transmit information. It may have something like 100 billion of them. Via networks of neurons, the brain processes information received externally from the environment, internally from ourselves. Like the rest of our body, the brain is built by genes. The process is, after all, genetic evolution. Some genes are ‘selected’ because they confer durable survival and reproductive benefits; others are not because they do not. Natural selection is simply the process regulating what gets through to the next generation, who gets through – ultimately, what works in a particular environmental setting. If our bodies have evolved, and our brains have evolved, why should what our brains do not evolve? Simply: some of the variants in what the brain has done may not have worked so well. They may well have not ‘got through’. Seen in this light, why should our mind be immune to evolution? Put the other way around: has virtually everything of serious importance about our body evolved except our brain and what it does?

The best statement by far of this approach is by Australian philosopher Peter Singer, whose work we’ll come to shortly. Singer states that it is time ‘to take seriously the fact that we are evolved animals, and that we bear the evidence of our inheritance, not only in our anatomy and DNA, but in our behaviour too.’

On Proposition 4, modularity, just look around.

Modularity is everywhere. When we deliberately set about building complex systems to perform complex tasks, we build them modularly. That is, with a lot of smaller component parts. Cars, phones and fridges, planes and political systems. In doing so, we are imitating nature. The principle of division and subdivision of tasks yielding outcome benefits can be found everywhere. In engineering, computer science and coding – on the back of a banknote. Consider the rear of the £20 note.

Here is the Bank of England celebrating functional modularity. Adam Smith wrote in his Wealth of Nations about the division of labour in a pin factory and the great increase in the quantity of work that results (you may just be able to read that on the note). The meta-task of making a pin was broken down into smaller specialist units or modules. It’s appropriate to mention Smith for while at Cambridge, Darwin read The Wealth of Nations. Then when Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ of the market became the silent and insensible workings of the ‘hand of time’ and natural selection. It is this unobservable process that produced mental modules over what Darwin calls ‘the long lapses of ages’. A module is simply a functional subunit. Its job is to perform a specific task – like part of the process of making a pin. You’ll find modules everywhere in nature. So what about the human mind? Can natural selection have created specialised programmes like the Kinsman?

For us, all this leaves two important takeaways. First, modules in nature are ubiquitous. Second, it is very likely that one of the most sophisticated and complex mechanisms in the known universe – the human mind – is modular. And, as we’ll see, that’s what the evidence indicates.

Meticulous neurophysiological experimentation has shown that the brain has different areas implicated in different functions. But note two things. Each area of the brain is not restricted to performing only one function. Equally, each area works in a network with others. The occipital lobe at the lower rear of the brain, for example, makes sense out of the visual information that pours in through the eyes to the retina, and which is then transmitted via the thalamus to the back of the brain (and from there to the parietal and temporal lobes). A series of structures, together called the limbic system, is associated with what is sometimes called the Four Fs: Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing and – getting lucky. And the limbic system is a perfect example of what we were considering: it is a network of structures, including the amygdala, the hippocampus and the hypothalamus, working in concert. So in the brain, unquestionably, function is to some extent localised.

There is therefore a growing weight of scientific evidence indicating that the human mind has organisational units or modules. But what are they like?

Proposition 5: these modules evolved in response to certain important regularly recurring life problems. What these modules are like and how they affect our behaviour is the substance of the book.

CONTENTS

About the Book

About the Author

FROM THE AUTHOR

PROLOGUE

The Kinsman

You Were Not Alone

PART I

THE PERCEIVER OF PAIN

ONE

The Argument