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

428 HOW THE MIND WORKSruthless instincts that are often mistakenly equated with Darwinism. InThe Godfather, Sollozzo says to Tom Hagen, "I don't like violence, Tom.I'm a businessman. Blood is a big expense." Even in the harshest competition,an intelligent organism must be a strategist, assessing whether itsgoals might best be served by retreat, conciliation, or living and lettinglive. As I explained in Chapter 5, it is genes, not organisms, that mustcompete or die; sometimes the genes' best strategy is to design organismsthat cooperate, and yes, even smile on their brother and love oneanother. Natural selection does not forbid cooperation and generosity; itjust makes them difficult engineering problems, like stereoscopic vision.The difficulty of building an organism to see in stereo has not preventednatural selection from installing stereo vision in humans, but we wouldnever have come to understand stereo if we thought it just came freewith having two eyes and failed to look for the sophisticated neural programsthat accomplish it. Similarly, the difficulty of building an organismto cooperate and be generous has not prevented natural selection frominstalling cooperation and generosity in humans, but we will neverunderstand these capacities if we think they just come free with living ingroups. The on-board computers of social organisms, especially ofhumans, should run sophisticated programs that assess the opportunitiesand risks at hand and compete or cooperate accordingly.The conflict of interest among the members of a species also does notcall for a conservative political agenda, as journalists and social scientistsoften fear. Some worry that if our motives put us into conflict with others,exploitation and violence would be morally correct; since they aredeplorable, conflict had better not be part of our nature. The reasoning,of course, is fallacious: nothing says that nature has to be nice, and whatpeople want to do is not necessarily what they ought to do. Others worrythat if conflicting motives are inevitable, it would be futile to try toreduce violence and exploitation; our current social arrangements wouldbe the best one can hope for. But that does not follow either. Amongmodern Western societies, homicide rates vary from 0.5 per million personsper year in Iceland in the first half of the twentieth century, to 10 inmost European countries at present, to 25 in Canada, to 100 in theUnited States and Brazil. There is plenty of room for practical measuresthat could reduce the murder rate before we are faced with the academicquestion of whether it can ever be reduced to zero. Moreover, there areways to reduce conflict other than to dream of a golden future of indiscriminatelove. People in all societies not only perpetrate violence but