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

398 J HOW THE MIND WORKSworld. Selection among branches of the tree of life is possible, but thathas nothing to do with whether organisms are designed for unselfishness.Animals just don't care what happens to their group, species, orecosystem. Wolves catch the old and weak deer because they are the easiestto catch. Hungry lemmings set out for better feeding grounds andsometimes fall or drown by accident, not suicide. Stags fight becauseeach wants to breed, and one concedes when defeat is inevitable, or aspart of a strategy that works on average against others playing the samestrategy. Males who fight are wasteful to the group—indeed, males ingeneral are wasteful to the group when they make up half of it, because afew studs could sire the next generation without eating half the food.Biologists often describe these acts as self-interested behavior, butwhat causes behavior is the activity of the brain, especially the circuitryfor emotions and other feelings. Animals behave selfishly because of howtheir emotion circuits are wired. My full stomach, my warmth, myorgasms, feel better to me than yours do, and I want mine, and will seekmine, more than yours. Of course, one animal cannot directly feel what'sin another one's stomach, but it could feel it indirectly by observing thesecond animal's behavior. So it is an interesting psychological fact thatanimals usually don't experience other animals' observable well-being astheir own pleasure. It is an even more interesting fact that they sometimesdo.Earlier I said that natural selection selects selfish replicators. If organismswere replicators, all organisms should be selfish. But organisms donot replicate. Your parents did not replicate when they had you, becauseyou are not identical to either of them. The blueprint that made you—your set of genes—is not the same as the blueprint that made them.Their genes were shuffled, randomly sampled to make sperm and eggs,and combined with each other's during fertilization to create a new combinationof genes and a new organism unlike them. The only things thatactually replicated were the genes and fragments of genes whose copiesmade it into you, some of which you will in turn pass down to your children,and so on. In fact, even if your mother had cloned herself, shewould not have replicated; only her genes would have. That is becauseany changes she underwent in her lifetime—losing a finger, acquiring a