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Editor's Note: Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery at Stanford University. He is the author of "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst". The opinions expressed in this comment are yours. Read more opinion articles at CNNE.COM/OPINION
(CNN) - As the pandemic breaks out, there is at least heroism that inspires us. Health workers who fight against this virus. Truck drivers and grocery stores maintain essential supply lines. Volunteers delivering food to older adults. The list goes on and on.
Naturally, there are also villains. Price fraudsters. Hate dealers. And then there are the people who endanger lives by refusing to distance themselves socially. How should we see this kind of villain?
I am not referring to the concentration of people protesting against quarantine, arguing that a closed economy is worse than the virus. While the concern for the poor and the newly unemployed is laudable, their humanitarianism is limited by their various political agendas.
The rebels I mean disobey the rules because, well, they want to. Maybe they don't know there is a virus circulating. Perhaps they care about others, but their circle of attention does not include anyone they consider to be at risk. Perhaps it is difficult to understand that concentrating on groups with bare faces could now be as dangerous as brandishing a weapon. Or maybe they are just selfish.
Understanding their actions seems challenging, given their varied motivations. This is what some of the main public health disobedience were saying when the virus became potent in March.
There were religious leaders who seemed to believe that no virus would dare harm them.
Megachurch pastor Rodney Howard-Browne in Florida proclaimed, "This Bible school is open because we are raising young vivists, not thoughts." (Howard-Browne later moved his Easter services virtually because, according to his lawyer, he had received death threats for maintaining his services. During his Easter morning broadcast, he claimed he was waiting for God to tell him when to reopen.) .
The sexton of a synagogue in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, Zalman Lipsker, who said the synagogue, "will be open until Moshiach - (the Messiah)." (Synagogue officials later announced that it would be closed "for a period.")
Bishop Gerald Glenn, an evangelist from Virginia, who served because, "God is greater than this dreaded virus." Glenn died of covid-19. Hasidic families in Brooklyn suffer excruciating losses, and the virus ravages rural America.
There are those who mock, instead of God or the Constitution giving it to them, is that the youth gave it to them, a belief in their immortality and in that of those who care about them, they were the revelers of the spring break and the fools who sneaked parties filled with posironic Corona beer, while the virus is stronger among young people than anticipated.
And then there are the survivors of "Don't Tread On Me," convinced that the government is confiscating constitutional rights through pandemic deception, using Benjamin Franklin with statements of, "If you trade freedom for security, you don't deserve it" and , in a move that would go through a hilarious absurdity in happier times, comparing itself favorably with civil rights activist Rosa Parks.
Some of these religious supporters and leaders may now be taking social distancing more seriously than when they first rejected it. But it is important to understand that religious fundamentalists were not challenging government rules because they want to become slaughtered lambs.
Instead, it's about wanting to meet in congregations. Idaho revolutionaries are not rebelling because the government conspires against their constitutional right to a speedy trial. It is the right to join. And invincible youths weren't challenging the rules against toilet paper statues. Defy the ban on hanging out with friends, and hooking up and vomiting after beer marathons.
Delete the details and it's all the same. Congregate. Assemble. Partying. It is the socialization of primates.
We primates are the most sociable species in the animal kingdom. Hunter-gatherers spend their afternoons murmuring around the fire; other primates show the equivalent. Record the vocalizations of the members of a group of baboons, splice things together so it sounds like two people are fighting and play them from a speaker in the bushes, and everyone stops what they're doing to listen.
Our socialization consoles us. We turn to loved ones after trauma, and doing so decreases the response to hormonal stress. After the baboons have a close call with a lion, they all sit down, groom themselves, and doing so diminishes the same stress response. Put us primates in solitary confinement and we will untangle ourselves.
Socialization pays off. Chimpanzees learn to make tools through social observation, monkeys have trouble learning transitivity with physical objects ("If A is bigger B and B is bigger than C, then A is bigger than C"), but it dominates social transitivity ("If A defeats B and B defeats C, then A defeats C").
While a lone altruist will be overtaken by a lone traitor, a group of the former triumphs over a group of the latter, a means of evolving cooperation. And humans, with our appalling speed, strength, and sensory acuity, avoid extinction by working in groups.
Our primate brains are sculpted by socialization. A region of the brain specializes in recognizing faces. Another classifies people by sex, age, race, and status, and decides, "Is this a us or a them?" in a fraction of a second. If a monkey lives in a larger social group, its frontal cortex enlarges.
We have evolved to disputes, eavesdropping, jousting, testing, competing, helping and stabbing in the back, and we have the brains to prove it. It's no wonder then that a friend's pixelated face on Zoom, or talking through a face mask with someone across the street, isn't the next logical step in social evolution. We are asked to go against our primate essence.
This is not to excuse those who will not keep their distance, but to scientifically explain sin while trying not to enrage the sinner. And maybe even to understand how to change their primate minds.
Coronavirus