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

Family Values 435nist is the ultimate conflict resolution technique, and our ancestors discoveredit long before they were people." Homicides cannot be writtenoff as the product of a diseased mind or a sick society. In most cases akilling is unplanned and undesired; it is the disastrous climax of an escalatingbattle in which brinkmanship has been carried too far. For everykilling there must be countless arguments that cool down and countlessthreats that are not carried out. That makes homicide an excellent assayfor conflict and its causes. Unlike lesser conflicts which can only be discoveredthrough reports that the participants can fudge, a homicideleaves a missing person or a dead body, which are hard to ignore, andhomicides are meticulously investigated and documented.People sometimes do murder their relatives. There are infanticides,filicides, parricides, matricides, fratricides, siblicides, uxoricides, familicides,and several unnamed kinds of kin-killing. In a typical data set froman American city, a quarter of the homicides are committed by strangers,a half by acquaintances, and a quarter by "relatives." But most of the relativesare not blood kin. They are spouses, in-laws, and step relations.Only two to six percent of homicide victims are done in by their bloodrelatives. In fact, that is surely an overestimate. People see their bloodrelatives more often than they see other people, so relatives are moreoften within striking distance. When one focuses on people who livetogether, so that the opportunities for interacting are held constant, onefinds that the risk of being killed by a nonrelative is at least eleven timesgreater than the risk of being killed by a blood relative, and probablymuch higher than that.The de-escalation of conflicts among blood relatives is part of a largerpattern of kin solidarity called nepotism. In everyday usage theword refers to bestowing favors on relatives (literally, "nephews") as aperquisite of a job or social rank. Institutional nepotism is officially illicitin our society, though it is widely practiced, and in most societies peopleare surprised to hear that we consider it a vice. In many countries anewly appointed official openly fires all the civil servants under him andreplaces them with relatives. Relatives are natural allies, and before theinvention of agriculture and cities, societies were organized around clansof them. One of the fundamental questions of anthropology is how foragingpeople divide themselves into bands or villages, typically with aboutfifty members though varying with the time and place. NapoleonChagnon amassed meticulous genealogies that link thousands of membersof the Yanomamo, the foraging and horticultural people of the