Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Revenge of the Nerds 197that most animals that provision their young do so with prey, the onlyfood that repays the effort to obtain it and transport it.Meat also figures into sexual politics. In all foraging societies, presumablyincluding our ancestors', hunting is overwhelmingly a maleactivity. Women are encumbered with children, which makes huntinginconvenient, and men are bigger and more adept at killing because oftheir evolutionary history of killing each other. As a result, males caninvest surplus meat in their children by provisioning the children's pregnantor nursing mothers. They also can trade meat with females for plantfoods or for sex. Brazen bartering of the carnal for the carnal has beenobserved in baboons and chimpanzees and is common in foraging peoples.Though people in modern societies are ever-so-more discreet, anexchange of resources for sexual access is still an important part of theinteractions between men and women all over the world. (Chapter 7explores these dynamics and how they originated in differences in reproductiveanatomy, though of course anatomy is not destiny in modernways of life.) In any case, we have not lost the association completely.Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior advises:There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be "offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin aseries of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount offood, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affectionincreases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When theaffection is the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstancescan the food be omitted.Of course no one really knows whether these four habits formed thebase camp for the ascent of human intelligence. And no one knowswhether there are other, untried gradients to intelligence in biologicaldesign space. But if these traits do explain why our ancestors were theonly species out of fifty million to follow that route, it would have soberingimplications for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A planetwith life may not be enough of a launching pad. Its history might have toinclude a nocturnal predator (to get stereo vision), with descendants thatswitched to a diurnal lifestyle (for color) in which they depended on fruit