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

Family Values 427makeup. In fact the men beat their wives, exterminated neighboringtribes, and treated homicide as a milestone in a young man's life whichentitled him to wear the face paint that Mead thought was so effeminate.In Human Universals, the anthropologist Donald Brown has assembledthe traits that as far as we know are found in all human cultures.They include prestige and status, inequality of power and wealth, property,inheritance, reciprocity, punishment, sexual modesty, sexual regulations,sexual jealousy, a male preference for young women as sexualpartners, a division of labor by sex (including more child care by womenand greater public political dominance by men), hostility to other groups,and conflict within the group, including violence, rape, and murder. Thelist should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with history, currentevents, or literature. There are a small number of plots in the world's fictionand drama, and the scholar Georges Polti claims to have listed themall. More than eighty percent are defined by adversaries (often murderous),by tragedies of kinship or love, or both. In the real world, our lifestories are largely stories of conflict: the hurts, guilts, and rivalriesinflicted by parents, siblings, children, spouses, lovers, friends, and competitors.This chapter is about the psychology of social relations. The Age ofAquarius notwithstanding, that means it is largely about inborn motivesthat put us into conflict with one another. Given that our brains wereshaped by natural selection, it could hardly be otherwise. Natural selectionis driven by the competition among genes to be represented in thenext generation. Reproduction leads to a geometric increase in descendants,and on a finite planet not every organism alive in one generationcan have descendants several generations hence. Therefore organismsreproduce, to some extent, at one another's expense. If one organism eatsa fish, that fish is no longer available to be eaten by another organism. Ifone organism mates with a second one, it denies an opportunity at parenthoodto a third. Everyone alive today is a descendant of millions ofgenerations of ancestors who lived under these constraints but reproducednonetheless. That means that all people today owe their existenceto having winners as ancestors, and everyone today is designed, at leastin some circumstances, to compete.That does not mean that people (or any other animals) house anaggressiye urge that must be discharged, an unconscious death wish, arapacious sex drive, a territorial imperative, a thirst for blood, or the other