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

442 | HOW THE MIND WORKSwithholds investment from one offspring is to save it for future ones. Anoffspring's conflict with its parents is really a rivalry with unborn Siblings.A tangible example is weaning conflict. The calories a mother convertsto milk are not available to grow a new offspring, so nursing suppressesovulation. At some point mammalian mothers wean their youngso their bodies can prepare for bearing a subsequent offspring; Whenthey do, the young mammal puts up a holy stink, hounding the motherfor access to the teat for weeks or months before acquiescing.When I mentioned the theory of parent-offspring conflict to console acolleague whose two-year-old son had become a pest after the birth ofa younger brother, he snapped, "All you're saying is that people are selfish!"Sleepless for weeks, he could be forgiven for missing the point.Clearly, parents aren't selfish; parents are the least selfish entities in theknown universe. But they aren't infinitely selfless either, or every whineand tantrum would be music to their ears. And the theory predicts thatchildren aren't completely selfish, either. If they were, they would murdereach newborn sibling to free up all the parents' investment for themselvesand would demand to be breast-fed all their lives. The reason theydon't is that they are partly related to their present and future siblings. Agene that made a child murder his newborn sister would have a fifty percentchance of destroying a copy of itself, and in most species that costoutweighs the benefit of having one's mother's milk all to oneself. (Insome species, like spotted hyenas and some birds of prey, the costs don'toutweigh the benefits, and siblings do murder one another.) A geine thatmade a fifteen-year-old want to nurse would foreclose an opportunity forhis mother to manufacture new copies of that gene inside viable siblings.Either cost would exceed twice the benefit, so most organisms have theirsiblings' interests at heart, though discounted relative to their own. Thepoint of the theory is not that children want to take or that parents don'twant to give; it's that children want to take more than what their parentswant to give.Parent-offspring conflict begins in the womb. A woman with an unbornchild seems like a vision of harmony and nurturance, but beneath theglow a mighty battle goes on inside her. The fetus tries to mine themother's body for nutrients at the expense of her ability to bear 1 future