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

Family Values 431descendants of slaves, curiosity about biological kin can drive a lifelongquest. (Entrepreneurs hope to exploit this motive when they send outthose computer-generated postcards that offer to trace Steven Pinker'sancestors and find the Pinker family seal and coat of arms.) Of course,people ordinarily do not test each other's DNA; they assess kinship byindirect means. Many animals do it by smell. Humans do it with severalkinds of information: who grows up together, who resembles whom, howpeople interact, what reliable sources say, and what can be logicallydeduced from other kin relationships.Once we know how we are related to other people, the other componentof the psychology of kinship kicks in. We feel a measure of solidarity,sympathy, tolerance, and trust toward our relatives, added on towhatever other feelings we may have for them. ("Home," according tothe poem by Robert Frost, is "something you somehow haven't todeserve.") The added good will one feels toward kin is doled out accordingto a feeling that reflects the probability that the kind act will help arelative propagate copies of one's genes. That in turn depends on thenearness of the relative to oneself in the family tree, the confidence onehas in that nearness, and the impact of the kindness on the relative'sprospects of reproducing (which depends on age and need). So parentslove their children above all others, cousins love each other but not asmuch as siblings do, and so on. Of course, no one crunches genetic andactuarial data and then decides how much to love. Rather, the mentalprograms for familial love were calibrated in the course of evolution sothat love correlated with the probability in the ancestral environment thata loving act would benefit copies of genes for loving acts.You might think this is just the banal observation that blood is thickerthan water. But in today's intellectual climate, the observation is a shocking,radical thesis. A Martian who wanted to learn about human interactionsfrom a textbook in social psychology would have no inkling thathumans behave any differently to their relatives than to strangers. Someanthropologists have argued that our sense of kinship has nothing to dowith biological relatedness. The conventional wisdom of Marxists, academicfeminists, and cafe intellectuals embraces some astonishing claims:that the nuclear family of husband, wife, and children is a historicalaberration unknown in centuries past and in the non-Western world;that in primitive tribes marriage is uncommon and people are indiscriminatelypromiscuous and free of jealousy; that throughout history thebride and groom had no say in their marriage; that romantic love was