Animal Personalities: Biography and History in Biology

I have argued that a biopolitical science would have to move through at least three levels of political evolutionary history: the natural history of political universals as shaped by the genetic evolution of each political species, the social history of political cultures as shaped by the cultural evolution of each community, and the biographical history of individual political actors in a community.  To illustrate this, I have written a paper studying Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation at these three levels of biopolitical science.

In making this argument, I disagree with those many critics of sociobiology who assume a nature/history dichotomy in claiming that the biological study of animal nature cannot explain human history.  One of the first critiques of Ed Wilson's Sociobiology was Kenneth Bock's Human Nature and History: A Response to Sociobiology, first published in 1980.  The central argument of this book is "that explication of social and cultural differences is a primary task of the human sciences and that such explication is best sought in comparison of human histories, not in human biology or comparative ethology" (ix).  Human biology or comparative ethology can study the biological nature that human beings share with other animals.  But Bock insisted that "animals other than man do not have histories" (198).  Animal behavior is determined by the biological nature of each species, which can be studied by biologists.  But human history in its contingency and diversity shows a human freedom from nature that transcends human biology, Bock argued, and this human history can be studied by historians, but not by biologists.

Bock does admit, if only in passing, that sometimes changes in an animal's environment can give rise "from time to time and from place to place to activities in one population of a species that were not there before and are not present among other populations of the species," and thus these animal populations might be said to have "histories," and those who study human history should be interested in this as possibly illuminating the character of historical phenomena (147-48). 

Here Bock was referring to some of the early evidence for animal cultural history.  And now we have much more evidence that many animals do indeed have cultural histories, so that animal groups of the same species develop distinctive behavioral traditions that distinguish one group from another.  We can see this, for example, in the different chimpanzee groups in Africa.  Jane Goodall's Chimpanzees of Gombe is a political history of the chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania, who have a unique suite of cultural traditions.

Goodall's political history of the Gombe chimps includes political biographies of the individual chimps who shaped that political history.  She gives all of the chimps names, and she records the stories that display their unique personalities.  When she went to Cambridge University to work on her Ph.D. in ethology (animal behavior), she was told that this was all wrong--that speaking about animals as having individual personalities is an anthropomorphic projection of uniquely human traits onto nonhuman animals.  To be truly scientific, she was told, she needed to reduce chimp behavior to general patterns of data without trying to explain the personal histories of individual chimps.

Similarly, John Hibbing, who is a leading proponent of the biological study of political behavior, has said that biopolitics must be limited to studying the "bedrock dilemmas of politics" that are universal to all political communities (Hibbing 2013).  While biology can illuminate "cross-polity commonality," biology has no application to variable traditions of political culture or to the biographical history of  individual political actors.  Thus, like Bock, he assumes that human cultural history and individual history transcend nature.  When I refer to the biographical history of Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation as a necessary part of a biopolitical science, Hibbing says that this is bringing in "non-biological factors" that cannot be studied biologically.  But if one includes the science of animal behavior within biology, and if one sees that the biological study of animal behavior includes the study of particular events in the political history of animal groups shaped by unique cultural traditions and unique individuals, then any biopolitical science must include political history and political biography.

For a long time, many biologists were not interested in the evolution of animal personalities, because they assumed that evolution would shape a species typical psychology shared by all individuals of the species with little heritable variation.  Evolutionary psychologists (like Leda Cosmides and John Tooby) have concentrated on human universals as evolutionary adaptations shared by all human individuals (Nettle 2006).

But  in recent decades, the biological study of animal personalities has become one of the hottest topics in biology (Carere and Maestripieri 2013; Pennisi 2016).  Actually, this is a rediscovery of what Aristotle explained in his biological works.  He recognized that "in a number of animals, we observe gentleness or fierceness, mildness or cross temper, courage or timidity, fear or confidence, high spirit or low cunning, and, with regard to intelligence, something equivalent to shrewdness" (History of Animals, 8.1).  In his Generation of Animals, Aristotle distinguished between three levels of inherited traits among animals.  An animal species, including the human species, shows generic traits shared with some other animals, specific traits shared with members of the same species, and temperamental traits that differ among individuals of the species.  Thomas Aquinas adopted this biological idea from Aristotle as showing three levels of natural law corresponding to generic nature, specific nature, and temperamental nature.

In the recent biological studies of animal personality, personality designates behavioral and physiological differences among individuals of the same species, which are stable across time and across different situations.  An individual personality is a consistent pattern in how an individual feels, thinks, and acts.  Some researchers have used different terms for this--such as temperments, behavioral syndromes, and predispositions.

Extensive empirical studies of animals in the wild and in laboratories have shown personalities across animal taxa--including invertebrates, fish, birds, and both nonhuman and human primates.  One of the most commonly observed traits of personality arises from the distinction between the active, risk-taking, aggressive, and bold personality, on the one hand, and the passive, risk-averse, nonaggressive, and shy personality, on the other hand.  Jerome Kagan has shown that human infants from an early age can be seen as showing either a bold and uninhibited personality or a shy and inhibited personality, and that as adults these differences in personality remain.  He also showed that these behavioral traits were correlated with distinctive neuroendrocine activity. 

This same continuum of behavioral traits from extreme boldness to extreme shyness can be found in other animals.  For example, among the great tits, a common Eurasian bird, some individuals are aggressively bold in their foraging for food, while others are less aggressive and more shy.  One might think that the aggressive individuals would always win out over the unaggressive individuals, but that's not true.  In one study, 541 individuals were tracked for 4 years.  It was found that when bird populations were low, and resources were abundant, aggressive individuals had higher rates of survival and reproduction.  But when bird populations were high, and resources were scarce, competition for territory and food sharpened, and the aggressive individuals wore themselves out by getting into too many fights, while the less aggressive individuals were more likely to survive and reproduce.

One of the most extensively studied models of human personality among psychologists is the Five Factor Model that describes human personality differences across five domains--Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN).  Each domain corresponds to an axis running from high to low.  So, for example, those individuals high in Agreeableness tend to be helpful, trusting, and cooperative with everyone.  Individuals lower in Agreeableness tend to be less helpful, more suspicious of others, and more competitive than cooperative.

This same Five Factor Model can be applied to the study of nonhuman animal personalities, using the same methods as are used in studying human beings.  Four of the factors appear in many animal species.  But Conscientiousness seems to appear only among chimpanzees and human beings.  One possible explanation for this is that Conscientiousness requires a high cognitive ability for making plans and controlling impulses in executing those plans, which requires the large frontal lobes found only in chimps and humans.

The five factors of personality have been found to be highly heritable and thus genetically influenced.  But these factors also vary according to environmental experience, particularly the environment of early experience, which influences personality throughout life. So personality seems to arise from genetic predisposition, from environmental learning, and from the interaction of genes and environment (including the cultural environment).  Through experimentation with animals in the wild and in laboratories, scientists can make testable predictions about the genetic and environmental causes of personality. 

They can also study the correlation of these personality traits with distinctive neurobiological and physiological substrates.  For example, the low neurotransmission of serotonin and the high neurotransmission of dopamine are associated with novelty-seeking and risk-taking.  Consequently, psychotropic drugs that alter this neurotransmission can have profound effects on mood and behavior.

It might seem strange that adaptive evolution by natural selection has not eliminated these differences in personality.  If natural selection is selecting for the optimal adaptation of a species to its environment for survival and reproduction, why wouldn't all or most individual animals of the same species show that same behavioral propensities, as suggested by evolutionary psychologists like Cosmides and Tooby?

One possible answer, as argued by David Nettle, is that there often is no optimal solution to the problems faced by animals, because they face trade-offs between different fitness costs and benefits, where there is no unconditionally best behavioral strategy.  We should consider the possibility that each personality trait in the Five Factor Model has evolutionary costs and benefits, and whether the benefits exceed the costs depends on contingent and fluctuating circumstances.  If this is so, then we should expect to see individuals showing alternative personality traits that are sometimes better and sometimes worse for the animal.

So, for instance, being high on Agreeableness might be beneficial for an individual in being attentive to the mental states of others, in enjoying cooperative relationships with others, and in being a good coalitional partner.  But that same personality trait of Agreeableness might also be costly for an individual who is too trusting in being exposed to social cheating and failing to maximize one's selfish advantage.

It is possible that the cultural evolution of the bourgeois virtues in modern liberal societies depended on an evolutionary history favoring personality traits like high Agreeableness and high Conscientiousness.  The evidence from cross-cultural economic game experiments that show that being integrated into market exchange is correlated with a greater sense of fairness might support this conclusion.

Just as we have bred domesticated animals to favor those personality traits that we find desirable, we might understand human culture as self-domestication that selects for those personality traits that are adapted to the culture.  The "human self-domestication hypothesis" has been defended by Hare and Woods (2020) and Wrangham (2019).  We might be like those silver foxes who were bred by Dmitri Belyaev for docility, which I wrote about in a previous post.

REFERENCES

Carere, Claudio, and Dario Maestripieri, eds. 2013. Animal Personalities: Behavior, Physiology, and Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hare, Brian, and Vanessa Woods. 2020. Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Common Humanity. New York: Random House.

Hibbing, John. 2013. "Ten Misconceptions Concerning Neurobiology and Politics." Perspectives on Politics. June 2013.

Nettle, Daniel. 2006. "The Evolution of Personality Variation in Humans and Other Animals." American Psychologist 61: 622-31.

Pennisi, Elizabeth. 2016. "The Power of Personality." Science 352: 644-47.

Wrangham, Richard. 2019. The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution. New York: Pantheon Books.


Some of my posts on these issues can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
 

Trump's Grandiose Narcissism and Other Chimpanzee Personalities

Donald Trump's Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a reminder of the importance of personality in political life.  This should draw attention to the biological science of political psychology, which includes the biological study of nonhuman animal personalities as showing the evolutionary roots of the personality traits manifest in U.S. presidents and other political actors.

Psychologists have identified two different dimensions of the narcissistic personality--grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism.  Trump is obviously a grandiose narcissist.

Psychologists have studied grandiose narcissism among U.S. Presidents.  Here's the abstract for one study (Watts et al. 2013):

"Recent research and theorizing suggest that narcissism may predict both positive and negative leadership behaviors.  We tested this hypothesis with data on the 42 U.S. presidents up to and including George W. Bush, using (a) expert-derived narcissism estimates, (b) independent historical surveys of presidential performance, and (c) largely or entirely objective indicators of presidential performance. Grandiose, but not vulnerable, narcissism was associated with superior overall greatness in an aggregate poll; it was also positively associated with public persuasiveness, crisis management, agenda setting, and allied behaviors, and with several objective indicators of performance, such as winning the popular vote and initiating legislation.  Nevertheless, grandiose narcissism was also associated with several negative outcomes, including congressional impeachment resolutions and unethical behaviors.  We found that presidents exhibit elevated levels of grandiose narcissism compared with the general population, and that presidents' grandiose narcissism has been rising over time.  Our findings suggest that grandiose narcissism may be a double-edged sword in the leadership domain."

This study built upon the data set of Rubenzer and Faschingbauer (2004), who had 121 expert raters (such as historians and psychologists who have studied the lives of the U.S. presidents) evaluate the personality of the 41 U.S. presidents up to and including Bill Clinton.  Watts et al. (2013) added ratings of George W. Bush from a previous study.  They were then able to rank the first 42 presidents for their grandiose narcissism.  Here are the top seven:

1. Lyndon Johnson
2. Teddy Roosevelt
3. Andrew Jackson
4. Franklin D. Roosevelt
5. John Kennedy
6. Richard Nixon
7. Bill Clinton

This suggests that Trump's grandiose narcissistic personality is not unique among the U.S. presidents, although we might wonder whether Trump manifests a more extreme form of this personality than any other president.  Perhaps this shouldn't surprise us.  After all, shouldn't we expect that the sort of person who would have the driving ambition for power that would motivate him to successfully win the presidency would often have the traits of a grandiose narcissist--such as fearless dominance?

These same personality traits can be seen in other political animals.  I have written about the biology of animal personalities (here), and particularly chimpanzee personalities (here).  For me, this shows that any biopolitical science needs to include the biological biographies of the individual animals in any political community.  The biological study of the political life of any animal community must include not only the genetic history of the species and the cultural history of the community, but also the individual history of the political actors in the community, with each individual having distinct personality traits.

Now, a new article (Weiss et al. 2017) presents a study of the personality traits of the chimpanzees in the Kasekela and Mitumba communities of Gombe National Park in Tanzania.  The New York Times has an article on this study.

The method for identifying the personality traits of these chimpanzees was essentially the same as that used for studying the personalities of U.S. presidents.  The personalities of 128 chimpanzees in Gombe were rated on 24 items from the "Hominoid Personality Questionaire," which is a slightly modified version of questionaires used to rate the personality of human beings as following the "five-factor-model" of personality based on five domains--Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN).  The ratings were made by the Tanzanian field assistants who have observed the chimpanzees at Gombe almost daily for over 30 years.

For each of the 24 items, the raters were asked to rate a chimpanzee on a seven point scale from low to high.  Each item was stated as an adjective along with one or two descriptive sentences.  Here are some examples:

"FEARFUL: Subject reacts excessively to real or imagined threats by displaying behaviors such as screaming, grimacing, running away or other signs of anxiety or distress."

"DOMINANT: Subject is able to displace, threaten, or take food from other chimpanzees.  Or subject may express high status by decisively intervening in social interactions."

"RECKLESS: Subject is rash or unconcerned about the consequences of its behaviors."

"THOUGHTLESS: Subject often behaves in a way that seems imprudent or forgetful."

"VULNERABLE: Subject is prone to be physically or emotionally hurt as a result of dominance displays, highly assertive behavior, aggression, or attack by another chimpanzee."

"BULLYING: Subject is overbearing and intimidating towards younger or lower ranking chimpanzees."

 "AGGRESSIVE: Subject often initiates fights or other menacing and agonistic encounters with other chimpanzees."

"IMPULSIVE: Subject often displays some spontaneous or sudden behavior that could not have been anticipated.  There often seems to be some emotional reason behind the sudden behavior."

These ratings were statistically analyzed for "interrater reliability"--that is, the degree to which the ratings of the same chimp by different raters agree.  For most of the items, the interrater reliabilities ranged from acceptable to good.

There are three important conclusions from this study.  First, this confirms that, like other animals that have been studied, these chimps really do show individual personalities.  Second, the patterns in the personalities of these wild chimps are similar to those found among captive chimps in zoos or study facilities.  Finally, this shows remarkable similarities in personality traits between these chimps and human beings, which suggests an evolutionary continuity in personality traits.

Notice how some of the items in the above list apply to Trump.  Dominant?  Reckless?  Thoughtless?  Bullying?  Aggressive?  Impulsive?  I have written some posts on "Trump's Chimpanzee Politics" (here  and here).

Notice also that the study of presidents found a connection between grandiose narcissism and impeachment resolutions and unethical behavior. If Trump is impeached by the Congress, or if the Cabinet uses the 25th Amendment to declare him "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office," we will have to decide whether Trump's personality traits are so dangerous for the country that he should be removed from office.

Can the president's authority to launch nuclear strikes with thousands of nuclear warheads be trusted to someone with the most extreme form of grandiose narcissism, perhaps even more extreme than Lyndon Johnson or any other previous president?  Or should the Congress declare that the president has no constitutional authority to launch a preemptive attack without a congressional declaration of war?


REFERENCES

Rubenzer, S. J., and T. R. Faschingbauer. 2004. Personality, Character, and Leadership in the White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents. Brassey's Inc.

Watts, Ashley, et al. 2013.  "The Double-Edged Sword of Grandiose Narcissism: Implications for Successful and Unsuccessful Leadership Among U.S. Presidents." Psychological Science 24: 2379-2389.

Weiss, Alexander, Michael Wilson, D. Anthony Collins, Deus Mjungu, Shadrack Kamenya, Steffen Foerster, and Anne E. Pusey. 2017. "Personality in the Chimpanzees of Gombe National Park." Scientific Data 4, article number: 170146.

Darwinian History and Biography in the Declaration of Independence

Instead of "Darwin and the Declaration of Independence," a better title for our panel in Brisbane might be "Darwin and the Second Sentence of the Declaration of Independence."  Because almost all of our attention in our papers is directed to that second sentence--"We hold these truths to be self-evident . . ."

Although this is a long sentence (55 words), it is still a small part of the Declaration, and the factual list of grievances against the King ("let facts be submitted to a candid world") is over two-thirds the length of the entire document.  If you look at the editing of Jefferson's draft by the Continental Congress, you will see that the delegates were predominantly concerned with the list of grievances.  There was almost no discussion of the second sentence at the time, as though it were an afterthought or a rhetorical flourish that did not require any serious thought.

The two most detailed critiques of the Declaration published in 1776 were Thomas Hutchinson's Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia and John Lind's An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress.  Lind said that he had taken "little or no notice" of the first few sentences because "the truth is, little or none does it deserve."  Hutchinson wrote only a few sentences about the opening lines and then moved on to "the facts which are alleged to be the evidence of injuries and usurpation."

Beginning about 30 years after the Declaration was signed, however, Jeffersonian Republicans began to direct public attention to that second sentence as possibly the seminal statement of the American creed, and now many people see it as a statement of the universal liberal creed for all of humanity and a standard for liberal reform throughout the rest of history right up to the present.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln eloquently expressed this rhetorical elevation of the second sentence: "All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of the reappearing tyranny and oppression."

If we agree with this, then we have to worry about whether Darwin and Darwinian science subvert or support that "abstract truth" of human liberty in the second sentence.  This explains why our panel papers are so preoccupied with this question.

But if we are also interested in the question of whether Darwin and Darwinian science subvert or support the understanding of the human political life that is expressed in the entire document of the Declaration, which includes not just "abstract truth," but also factual political history and the political judgments of individual political agents, then we have to wonder whether a Darwinian political science can explain the historicity and individuality of political life.

As I indicated in my first post this month, I am trying in my paper to move through three levels of political experience by illustrating how a Darwinian biopolitical framework applies to the study of the Declaration of Independence as an event in the natural history of human politics, in the cultural history of the American political founding, and in the individual history of Thomas Jefferson and the others who signed the Declaration.


DARWINIAN POLITICAL HISTORY

As I have said in a previous post, I disagree with those many critics of sociobiology who assume a sharp dichotomy between nature and history in claiming that the biological study of animal nature cannot explain human history.  One of the first critiques of Ed Wilson's Sociobiology was Kenneth Bock's Human Nature and History: A Response to Sociobiology, first published in 1980.  The central argument of this book is "that explication of social and cultural differences is a primary task of the human sciences and that such explication is best sought in comparison of human histories, not in human biology or comparative ethology" (ix).  Human biology or comparative ethology can study the biological nature that human beings share with other animals.  But Bock insisted that "animals other than man do not have histories" (198).  Animal behavior is determined by the biological nature of each species, which can be studied by biologists.  But human history in its contingency and diversity shows a human freedom from nature that transcends human biology, which can be studied by historians, but not by biologists.

Similarly, political scientist John Hibbing, who is a leading proponent of the biological study of political behavior, has said that biopolitics must be limited to studying the "bedrock dilemmas of politics" that are universal to all political communities.  While biology can illuminate "cross-polity commonality," biology has no application to variable traditions of political culture or to the biographical history of  individual political actors.  Like Bock, he assumes that human cultural history and individual history transcend nature.  When I refer to the biographical history of Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation as a necessary part of a biopolitical science, Hibbing says that this is bringing in "non-biological factors" that cannot be studied biologically.  

But if one includes the science of animal behavior within biology, and if one sees that the biological study of animal behavior includes the study of particular events in the political history of animal groups shaped by unique cultural traditions and unique individuals, then any biopolitical science must include political history and political biography.  Political histories of particular chimpanzee groups like Jane Goodall's Chimpanzees of Gombe and Frans de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics and Good Natured illustrate this.

De Waal shows that every chimpanzee group has prescriptive rules of social conduct enforced by the community through reward and punishment that are acquired social conventions derived from a hierarchical organization, in which subordinate individuals pay close attention to dominant individuals (Good Natured, 89-97).  For example, Jimoh, the alpha male of the Yerkes Field Station group once detected a secret mating between Socko, an adolescent male, and one of Jimoh's favorite females.  The normal response would be for the dominant to chase away the subordinate.  But this time, Jimoh chased Socko all around the enclosure without stopping, while Socko screamed and defecated in fear.  

Several females began to "woaow" bark, which is a sound of indignation used to protest aggressors.  De Waal writes: "At first the callers looked around to see how the rest of the group was reacting; but when  others joined in, particularly the top-ranking female, the intensity of their calls quickly increased until literally everyone's voice was part of the deafening chorus.  The scattered beginning almost gave the impression that the group was taking a vote.  Once the protest had swelled to a chorus, Jimoh broke off his attack with a nervous grin on his face: he got the message.  Had he failed to respond, there would no doubt have been concerted female action to end the disturbance" (91-92).

The enforcement of prescriptive rules in chimpanzee groups is organized through a hierarchical structure of three orders.  To explain this, de Waal has learned from his reading of Machiavelli's Prince.  Machiavelli saw politics as competition for power and glory organized around three types of human beings: the "prince," who is number one; the "great ones," who are high-ranking individuals with ambition to rule; and the "people," who are the majority of the individuals in a society with no ambition to rule, but who do not want to be oppressed by the "prince" or the "great ones."  De Waal has seen a similar social structure among the chimpanzees: the alpha male is the "prince"; the high-ranking males are the "great ones"; and all the others in the group are the "common people" (Chimpanzee Politics, 149).

Machiavelli and John Adams thought that a stable regime would have to balance these three orders in a manner that would satisfy the ambitions and appetites of all three without anyone having the power to tyrannize over others.  De Waal has seen something like this among chimpanzees.  There is a "balance of power: the superiority of one party over another depends on the support of a third, so that each party affects the position of the others," which creates something like a "democratic structure."  (I have written about this in Darwinian Conservatism, 73-84.)

Despite these similarities between chimpanzee politics and human politics, human beings are unique in expressing their prescriptive rules through verbal and written language, while chimpanzees must rely on verbal and nonverbal signs without the conceptual complexity of human language to formulate their rules of justice and the common good.  We can see that in the Declaration's written list of grievances against the King, which continues the old tradition in English history of parchment documents, which included "declarations" bringing charges of wrongdoing and appealing for public support.  The best known of these English declarations was the Declaration of Rights of 1689, which justified the overthrow of James II and the installation of William and Mary on the throne.  Many of the charges against James II and even the exact language are echoed in list of grievances in the American Declaration of Independence (see Pauline Maier, American Scripture, 50-59).

So, to understand this part of the American Declaration, we need to see how it follows in the historical tradition of written English declarations to justify overthrowing kings.  But we can also see here a general pattern of primate politics that belongs to evolved human nature.  Most of the grievances are directed against the King.  But the Declaration also speaks of appeals to the British people, who have been warned "from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us."  Here we see the three orders of primate politics: the one (the King), the few (the Parliament), and the many (the people).

We see the same three orders in the American deliberation over declaring independence.  In the four months prior to the drafting and signing of the Declaration of Independence, popular assemblies were held in towns across the colonies to debate the merits of independence and to submit their recommendations to the colonial legislatures, who in turn instructed their delegates to the Continental Congress.  So while the people as a whole are supposed to exercise the ultimate authority, they are represented by a few politically ambitious people in the colonial legislatures and the Congress.  Then, with the overthrow of the King and the establishment of new state governments, the executive power will be vested in one dominant individual.  Eventually, the Constitution of 1787 will establish the office of the presidency and the commander in chief, held first by "His Excellency" George Washington.  One, few, and many.


DARWINIAN POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY

The striving for political dominance--to be number one--exhibits a distinctive political personality found among political animals generally, the sort of personality characteristic of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence.  At this level of political science, we must study the individual lives of political agents and their personalities.

For a long time, many biologists were not interested in the evolution of animal personalities, because they assumed that evolution would shape a species typical psychology shared by all individuals of the species with little heritable variation.  Evolutionary psychologists (like Leda Cosmides and John Tooby) have concentrated on human universals as evolutionary adaptations shared by all human individuals.

But  in recent decades, the biological study of animal personalities has become one of the hottest topics in biology.  Actually, this is a rediscovery of what Aristotle explained in his biological works.  He recognized that "in a number of animals, we observe gentleness or fierceness, mildness or cross temper, courage or timidity, fear or confidence, high spirit or low cunning, and, with regard to intelligence, something equivalent to shrewdness" (History of Animals, 8.1).  In his Generation of Animals, Aristotle distinguished between three levels of inherited traits among animals.  An animal species, including the human species, shows generic traits shared with some other animals, specific traits shared with members of the same species, and temperamental traits that differ among individuals of the species.  Thomas Aquinas adopted this biological idea from Aristotle as showing three levels of natural law corresponding to generic nature, specific nature, and temperamental nature.

In the recent biological studies of animal personality, personality designates behavioral and physiological differences among individuals of the same species, which are stable across time and across different situations.  An individual personality is a consistent pattern in how an individual feels, thinks, and acts.  Some researchers have used different terms for this--such as temperaments, behavioral syndromes, and predispositions.

One of the most extensively studied models of human personality among psychologists is the Five Factor Model that describes human personality differences across five domains--Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN).  Each domain corresponds to an axis running from high to low.  So, for example, those individuals high in Agreeableness tend to be helpful, trusting, and cooperative with everyone.  Individuals lower in Agreeableness tend to be less helpful, more suspicious of others, and more competitive than cooperative.

This same Five Factor Model can be applied to the study of nonhuman animal personalities, using the same methods as are used in studying human beings.  Four of the factors appear in many animal species.  But Conscientiousness seems to appear only among chimpanzees and human beings.  One possible explanation for this is that Conscientiousness requires a high cognitive ability for making plans and controlling impulses in executing those plans, which requires the large frontal lobes found only in chimps and humans.

As I have noted some previous posts (here and here), the same techniques used by historians and psychologists to identify the personalities of American presidents (such as Donald Trump's "grandiose narcissism") can be used to identify similar personalities among chimpanzees.  Also, like human beings, other mammalian animals (including chimpanzees) show individual variability in heritable intelligence (IQ).

In putting their unique signatures to the Declaration of Independence, the 56 signers pledge to one another their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.  In fact, under British law, the punishment for treason was death and forfeiture of one's estate, and certainly dishonor.  But as Douglass Adair has shown, these men were motivated to take this risk for the same of the glory, the fame, the honor that would come to them if the Revolution was successful.

But such glory cannot be equally shared by all 56 individuals.  There can be only one alpha male.  Consider, for example, the competitive striving between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  On May 10, 1776, the Congress adopted a resolution recommending that every colony draft a new constitution to replace the colonial charters.  On May 15, Adams presented a resolution he had drafted to serve as a preface to this recommendation, and this preface was worded as a de facto declaration of independence.  Adams described these words to a friend as "the most important resolution that ever was taken in America,"  Two days later, on May 17, he wrote to Abigail, to tell her that he had just become America's Moses:

"Is it not a saying of Moses, 'Who am I, that I should go in and out before this great People?'  When I consider the great events which are passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing, and that I may have been instrumental in touching some Springs, and turning some small Wheels, which have had and will have such Effects, I feel an Awe upon my Mind, which is not easily described."

Up to the end of his life, fifty years later, Adams was still insisting that he had drafted the real declaration of independence.  He complained that the prominence given to the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson's drafting of it was unfair.  "Was there ever a Coup de Theatre, that had so great an effect as Jefferson's Penmanship of the Declaration of Independence?" Adams asked.  He insisted that the Declaration was merely "a theatrical side show . . . Jefferson ran away with the stage effect--and all the glory of it."

"All honor to Jefferson."

On Jefferson's grave monument, he identified himself as "The Author of the Declaration of American Independence."

Jefferson's prominence among the drafters and signers of the Declaration is suggested in John Trumbull's painting displayed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda since 1826.  42 of the 56 signors are in the painting.  Trumbull was unable to find likenesses of 14 of the signers.  But he does allow each of the 42 to have a clear individually painted face.  The painting depicts the five-man drafting committee presenting their draft to the Congress on June 26.  The five men of the drafting committee stand out, but Jefferson stands in front, and he holds the center of the painting.  It also helps--as it always does--that he is the tallest man (at 6' 2"), while Adams is shorter (5' 7").  The Wikipedia article on Trumbull's painting allows you to click on each face for a biography.

A Darwinian science of politics must include a political psychology of such political ambition that for the most ambitious men means striving for the glory of being number one.  This requires a study of the political biographies of people like Jefferson and Adams, with personalities shaped by the genetic evolution of political animals, the cultural evolution of political history, and their own life histories.

What Jane Goodall Has Taught Us About Biopolitical History

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Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of Jane Goodall's arrival at the Gombe Stream Preserve in Tanzania on July 14, 1960.  There she initiated the first long-term study of a wild chimpanzee group.  Remarkably, she was only 26 years old; and she did not even have a college degree. She supervised the work at Gombe until 1986.  Others have continued the work at Gombe up to the present.

By the early 1970s, the National Geographic Society had crafted Goodall into one of the celebrated scientists of the 20th century--mostly through its National Geographical TV documentaries.

I can now see that Goodall was crucial in teaching me that a biopolitical science of political animals (including humans and chimps) would have to move through three levels of evolutionary history in complex interaction: the genetic history of the species, the cultural history of the group, and the individual history of animals within the group.

In 1975, I read Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which planted in my mind the idea of developing a biopolitical philosophy that would be both Aristotelian and Darwinian.  Then, in 1980, I read Kenneth Bock's Human Nature and History, which was one of the first critiques of Wilson's book.  Bock argued that the biological study of animal nature cannot explain human history, because "animals other than man do not have histories," and human history in its contingency and diversity shows a human freedom from nature that transcends human biology.  Human history can be studied by historians, but not by biologists.

I saw that Bock was taking the side of Thomas Hobbes against Aristotle, because Hobbes argued that Aristotle was wrong in declaring that human beings were political animals by nature, because while human politics was a product of uniquely human social learning and individual judgment, the politics of the political animals was determined by fixed instincts.  But I wondered whether Aristotle might be right in claiming in his biological works that the political life of nonhuman animals was shaped by their cultural learning and individual personalities, just like human politics.

In 1986, I read Goodall's Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior; and I was surprised to see that she took the side of Aristotle against Hobbes, because her book was a political history of the Gombe chimpanzees showing that they had distinctive cultural traditions and individual personalities.  She showed that the genetic nature of the species set the "patterns of behavior"--predictable general propensities found in every chimpanzee group, like dominance hierarchies.  But she could not predict the precise history of the "chimpanzees of Gombe," because of the historical contingences of the cultural traditions and individual personalities that made the chimpanzee group at Gombe unique.  If she was right, Bock was wrong: these Gombe chimps did have a history, and this history of animal culture and individuality would have to be part of any biological science of politics.

Also in 1986, I attended an international conference on chimpanzee studies in Chicago sponsored by the Chicago Academy of Sciences.  Goodall was there.  And one of the preeminent topics was the growing interest in chimpanzee culture.  The high point for me was sharing an elevator with Goodall!

In 1998, in Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature, I was able to defend Aristotle's account of political animals against the Hobbesian and Kantian claim that "culture" is the human transcendence of animal nature.  I could argue: "Like human beings and other primates, chimpanzees are cultural and historical animals."

In 2012, in my book chapter "Biopolitical Science," I gave a fuller account of the three-levelled analysis of biopolitical science--the unity of political universals, the diversity of political cultures, and the individuality of political judgments.  I worked through those three levels of biopolitical history as they are generally manifested in human politics and as they were particularly illustrated in Abraham Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

I argued that the individual personality of animals had to be included in any biopolitical science, because biologists now recognize that personality is part of animal psychology.  One of the most extensively studied models of human personality is the Five Factor Model that describes human personality differences across five domains--Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN).  Each domain corresponds to an axis running from high to low.  This same OCEAN model can be applied to the study of nonhuman animals.  And it has been shown that chimpanzee personalities display all five domains, just like human beings.

More recently, in some of my posts, I have argued that a Darwinian social psychology needs to understand the interaction of genetic history (the evolutionary psychology of Tooby and Cosmides), cultural history (the cultural group selection of Richerson, Boyd, and Henrich), and biographical history (the evolved personality and life history of self-interested individuals who are agents of cultural change acting through coercion or persuasion, as presented by Singh, Wrangham, and Glowacki).

There is complex co-evolutionary interaction between these three levels of history.  Genetic history enables and constrains, but does not determine, cultural history.  Genetic history and cultural history jointly enable and constrain, but do not determine, biographical history.

The interaction also moves in the opposite direction: biographical history enables and constrains, but does not determine, cultural history; and biographical history and cultural history jointly enable and constrain, but do not determine, genetic history.

Perhaps the most famous illustration of how cultural history can shape genetic history is the evolution of adult lactose tolerance.  Most human beings around the world today cannot easily digest milk, because after weaning from their mother's milk, they no longer produce lactase--the enzyme necessary for digesting the sugar lactose in milk.  This was probably true for most human beings throughout evolutionary history.  But then in pastoral societies with cultural traditions of dairying, milk was available as food for adults, which created a cultural environment in which genetic mutations for the production of lactase in adults would be favored by natural selection.  The people today who are lactose tolerant are descendants of those human beings who lived in dairying cultures.  Their genetic history was shaped by cultural history.

For me, understanding this co-evolution of genes, culture, and individuals began with Goodall's chimps.

Some of these points are elaborated in previous posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here., and here.

Biopolitical Science in Darwin's DESCENT OF MAN: The Coevolutionary History of Nature, Culture, and Individuals

Charles Darwin's Descent of Man was published on February 24, 1871.  So this year is the 150th anniversary of its publication.  This has prompted some recent articles--including a particularly good one by Richerson, Gavrilets, and de Waal (2021) in Science--and a book edited by Jeremy DeSilva (2021) assessing Darwin's account of human evolution Descent in the light of modern evolutionary science.

On some points, we can see that Darwin was mistaken.  For example, he claimed that because of their distinct roles in the sexual division of labor, women were intellectually inferior but morally superior to men.  In 1875, only four years after the publication of Descent, Antoinette Brown Blackwell showed that Darwin's evidence did not support his conclusion about the intellectual inferiority of women, and that the correct inference from the biological facts was that the sexes are "true equivalents--equals but not identicals."  I have written about this in Darwinian Natural Right (123-160).

His most fundamental mistake was in trying to explain the inherited transmission of parental traits to their offspring through the "hypothesis of pangenesis"--the idea that every part of the body emits tiny particles ("gemmules") that migrate to the gonads and then are transmitted to offspring, so that the gemmules develop into their associated body parts as the offspring matures (Darwin 2004, 264-267).  Unfortunately, Darwin knew nothing about Gregor Mendel's experiments that provided the first evidence for genetic inheritance.  Mendel knew a lot about Darwin, however, and he agreed with Darwin's theory of evolution.  In his handwritten annotations in his copies of Darwin's books, Mendel endorsed most of Darwin's reasoning, while correcting what he said about pangenesis (Fairbanks 2020).  In his annotations of The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Mendel highlighted those passages where Darwin admitted that pangenesis was "merely a provisional hypothesis or speculation," and that "the existence of free gemmules is a gratuitous assumption."  Mendel was an Augustinian friar, and he was condemned by those in the Catholic Church who regarded his support for evolution as a denial of the Catholic doctrine of Creation.

For me, rereading The Descent of Man today is instructive in two ways.  First, while some evolutionary biologists have criticized the "modern evolutionary synthesis" as being too "gene-centric" in not recognizing the importance of cultural evolution, most of what they have proposed as part of an "extended evolutionary synthesis" can be found in The Descent of Man.  In particular, Darwin stresses the importance of cultural evolution, including moral evolution, for explaining human biological nature.  This is what Richerson, Gavrilets, and de Waal mean in saying that Darwin's Descent "foreshadowed" modern theories of human gene-culture coevolution.  I have written about this in previous posts here and here.

Darwin's Descent is also instructive for me because it largely supports what I have called "biopolitical science," which requires a three-levelled analysis of political history as showing the unity of political universals, the diversity of political cultures, and the individuality of political judgments.  I have worked through these three levels of biopolitical history as they are generally manifested in human politics and as they were particularly illustrated in Abraham Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 (Arnhart 2012).  This idea of biopolitical science first came to me in 1986 when I read Jane Goodall's Chimpanzees of Gombe, and I saw that this was a political history of the chimps at Gombe showing the natural history of chimpanzee politics, the cultural history of this particular chimpanzee community, and the biographical history of the unique individuals in that community.  I have written some posts on this here, here, and here.

I have argued that a Darwinian social psychology needs to understand the interaction of genetic history (the evolutionary psychology of Tooby and Cosmides), cultural history (the cultural group selection of Richerson, Boyd, and Henrich), and biographical history (the evolved personality and life history of self-interested individuals who are agents of cultural change acting through coercion or persuasion, as presented by Singh, Wrangham, and Glowacki).

There is a complex coevolutionary interaction between these three levels of history.  Genetic history enables and constrains, but does not determine, cultural history.  Genetic history and cultural history jointly enable and constrain, but do not determine, biographical history.

The interaction also moves in the opposite direction: biographical history enables and constrains, but does not determine, cultural history; and biographical history and cultural history jointly enable and constrain, but do not determine, genetic history.

A famous illustration of how cultural history can shape genetic history is the evolution of adult lactose tolerance (Durham 1991; Gerbault et al. 2011).  Most human beings around the world today cannot easily digest milk, because after weaning from their mother's milk, they no longer produce lactase, an enzyme necessary for digesting the sugar lactose in milk.  This was probably true for most human beings throughout evolutionary history.  But then in pastoral societies with cultural traditions of dairying, milk was available as food for adults, which created a cultural environment in which genetic mutations for the production of lactase in adults would be favored by natural selection.  The people today who are lactose tolerant are descendants of those human beings who lived in dairying cultures.  Their genetic history was shaped by a cultural history favoring the evolution of lactase persistence as human niche construction.

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF HUMAN EVOLUTION

Despite Darwin's ignorance of genetics and the very skimpy fossil evidence of human evolution available to him, he was able to infer the general pattern of human evolution from primate ancestors.  He saw that of the living primate species, the gorilla and chimpanzee were most closely related to human beings; and since these apes lived in Africa, he speculated that the earliest human ancestors must have originally evolved in Africa, and then their ancestors migrated out of Africa to spread out over the Earth (Darwin 2004, 182).  As Richerson, Gavrilets, and de Waal (2021) have shown, the research since Darwin has filled in the details of this general pattern of phylogenetic descent of Homo sapiens from primate ancestors in Africa.

Moreover, they indicate that research in neurobiology, genetics, primatology, and behavioral biology has confirmed Darwin's insight that although there appear to be great gaps in the mental faculties of human beings and other animals, human cognitive capacities "do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree" from the cognitive capacities of other animals (Darwin 2004, 173).  They do not notice, however, that Darwin contradicts himself on this point when he says that humans really are different in kind in their unique capacities for language, morality, and symbolic abstraction.  As I have claimed in some previous posts, Darwin could have escaped this contradiction if he had seen the distinction between emergent differences in kind that can be explained by natural evolution and radical differences in kind that suggest some supernatural special creation.  Richerson, Gavrilets, and de Waal implicitly recognize the uniqueness of human language as an emergent difference in kind when they admit that communication among other animals does not manifest "the syntax, recursiveness, and rich meaning of our learned symbolic communication" (2).  Symbolic language is crucial for human cultural and moral evolution because it is the most effective means for formulating and transmitting social norms.

THE CULTURAL AND MORAL HISTORY OF HUMAN EVOLUTION

A crucial part of Darwin's theory of human evolution in The Descent of Man was his account of human cultural and moral evolution.  "Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment--originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit" (2004, 157).  In developing this thought, he was influenced by the Scottish tradition of moral philosophy through his reading of David Hume, Adam Smith, and James Macintosh.  He thus rejected the Kantian tradition of moral philosophy in which culture and morality were seen as a uniquely human realm of activity that transcended human nature.

Remarkably, even some of Darwin's strongest supporters--including Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Huxley--rejected Darwin's naturalistic account of moral culture because they believed that one could never derive moral values from natural facts.  They assumed that human morality belonged to a transcendent realm of cultural artifice and free will that is beyond the natural realm of causal forces open to scientific study.

Until recently, even most of the  leading thinkers in evolutionary psychology--such as John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and David Buss--rejected Darwin's evolutionary theory of morality.  Over the past 20 years, however, many of these people have moved towards thinking that Darwin was right about this.  Closely related to this is the growing recognition that culture is not uniquely human, because other animals have cultural traditions.  Richerson, Gavrilets, and de Waal rightly see these intellectual movements as confirming Darwin's original insight that explaining culture and morality belongs to the evolutionary science of biology.

Richerson, Gavrilets, and de Waal fail, however, to clearly indicate that human culture and morality really are humanly unique insofar as they depend on the human capacity for symbolic abstraction.  Although other animals have behavioral inheritance systems based on the transmission of information among animals through social learning, only human beings have symbolic inheritance systems in which they think about abstractions that have little to do with concrete, immediate experiences.  Symbolic systems allow human beings to construct a shared imagined reality.  Art, religion, science, philosophy, and morality are all manifestations of human symbolic evolution.  Richerson, Gavrilets, and de Waal suggest this when they refer to "the symbolized nature of human culture" (3).

A biopolitical science must explain this symbolic evolution as the realm for political rhetoric and political philosophy.  For example, we might explain Lockean liberalism as the symbolic niche construction of liberal institutions.  Similarly, we might describe this, as it is by Deirdre McCloskey, as a rhetorical transformation in ethical ideas, moving from an aristocratic ethics that scorned the pursuit of trade and economic gain to a bourgeois ethics in which life in a commercial society became virtuous.

THE INDIVIDUAL HISTORY OF HUMAN EVOLUTION

Animals are individuals with characteristic personalities that distinguish one individual from another, and this individuality influences their evolutionary history.  In The Descent of Man, Darwin suggested this when he observed that animals often display their "mental individuality" (106).  He saw evidence for the importance of human individuality in shaping human cultural evolution in Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius (first published in 1869).  Darwin and Galton recognized that the fertilization of an egg created an individual life with an innate predisposition for developing an individual personality (Galton 1972, 426-28).  Some individuals were endowed with the potential for genius, and in the right social circumstances they could invent new ideas and practices that would advance cultural progress.  Darwin observed: "Great lawgivers, the founders of beneficent religions, great philosophers and discoverers in science, aid the progress of mankind" (2004, 162).

Darwin indicated how this progress arises from the complex coevolutionary interaction of individual history, cultural history, and natural history:

"The more efficient causes of progress seem to consist of a good education during youth whilst the brain is impressible, and of a high standard of excellence, inculcated by the ablest and best men, embodied in the laws, customs, and traditions of the nation, and enforced by public opinion.  It should, however, be borne in mind, that the enforcement of public opinion depends on our appreciation of the approbation and disapprobation of others; and this appreciation is founded on our sympathy, which it can hardly be doubted was originally developed through natural selection as one of the most important elements of the social instincts" (2004, 169).

At the level of natural history, natural selection has shaped the innate social instincts of human beings, which make them sensitive to the approbation or disapprobation of people in their community.  At the level of cultural history,  this concern for social conformity motivates human beings to learn the social norms of their group.  At the level of individual history, those talented individuals with persuasive influence or authority over the group can select the social norms that will be enforced by public opinion.

After Darwin, for a long time, many biologists were not interested in studying the evolution of individual animal personalities, because they assumed that evolution would shape a species typical psychology shared by all individuals of the species with little heritable variation.  Evolutionary psychologists (like Leda Cosmides and John Tooby) have concentrated on human universals as evolutionary adaptations shared by all human individuals.

But  in recent decades, the biological study of animal personalities has become one of the hottest topics in biology.  One of the most extensively studied models of human personality among psychologists is the Five Factor Model that describes human personality differences across five domains--Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN).  Each domain corresponds to an axis running from high to low.  So, for example, those individuals high in Agreeableness tend to be helpful, trusting, and cooperative with everyone.  Individuals lower in Agreeableness tend to be less helpful, more suspicious of others, and more competitive than cooperative.

This same Five Factor Model can be applied to the study of nonhuman animal personalities, using the same methods as are used in studying human beings.  Four of the factors appear in many animal species.  But Conscientiousness seems to appear only among chimpanzees and human beings.  One possible explanation for this is that Conscientiousness requires a high cognitive ability for making plans and controlling impulses in executing those plans, which requires the large frontal lobes found only in chimps and humans.

The five factors of personality have been found to be highly heritable and thus genetically influenced.  But these factors also vary according to environmental experience, particularly the environment of early experience, which influences personality throughout life. So personality seems to arise from genetic predisposition, from environmental learning, and from the interaction of genes and environment (including the cultural environment).  Through experimentation with animals in the wild and in laboratories, scientists can make testable predictions about the genetic and environmental causes of personality. 

It is possible that the cultural evolution of the bourgeois virtues in modern liberal societies depended on an evolutionary history favoring personality traits like high Agreeableness and high Conscientiousness.  The evidence from cross-cultural economic game experiments that show that being integrated into market exchange is correlated with a greater sense of fairness might support this conclusion.

Just as we have bred domesticated animals to favor those personality traits that we find desirable, we might understand human culture as self-domestication that selects for those personality traits that are adapted to the culture.  The "human self-domestication hypothesis" has been defended by Hare and Woods (2020) and Wrangham (2019).  We might be like those silver foxes who were bred by Dmitri Belyaev for docility, which I wrote about in a previous post.

REFERENCES

Arnhart, Larry. 2012. "Biopolitical Science."  In James E. Fleming and Sanford Levinson, eds., Evolution and Morality, 221-265. New York: New York University Press.

Darwin, Charles. 2004 [1879].  The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2nd edition. 

New York: Penguin Books.

DeSilva, Jeremy, ed. 2021.  A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin's "Descent of Man" Got Right and Wrong About Human Evolution.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Durham, William H. 1991. Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Fairbanks, Daniel J. 2020. "Mendel and Darwin: Untangling a Persistent Enigma." Heredity 124: 263-273.

Galton, Francis. 1972 [1892].  Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. 2nd edition. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.

Gerbault, Pascale, et al. 2011. "Evolution of Lactase Persistence: An Example of Human Niche Construction." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 366: 863-877.

Hare, Brian, and Vanessa Woods. 2020. Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Common Humanity. New York: Random House.

Richerson, Peter J., Sergey Gavrilets, and Frans B. M. de Waal. 2021. "Modern Theories of Human Evolution Foreshadowed by Darwin's Descent of Man." Science 372: eaba3776.

Singh, Manvir, Richard Wrangham, and Luke Glowacki. 2017. "Self-Interest and the Design of Rules." Human Nature 28: 457-480.

Wrangham, Richard. 2019. The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution. New York: Pantheon Books.