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

Family Values 455that served them in the rumpus room right into adulthood? One possibilityis that siblings never completely escape the orbit of their parents, butcompete all their lives. That is certainly true in traditional societies,including foraging groups. Another is that tactics like assertiveness andconservatism are skills like any other. As a young person invests moreand more in honing them, she becomes increasingly loath to retrace thelearning curve to cultivate new strategies for dealing with people.The discovery that children brought up in the same family are nomore similar than they would be if they had been brought up on differentplanets shows how poorly we understand the development of personality.All we know is that cherished ideas about the influence of parents arewrong. The most promising hypotheses, I suspect, will come from recognizingthat childhood is a jungle and that the first problem children facein life is how to hold their own among siblings and peers.The relationship between a brother and a sister has an added twist: oneis male, one is female, and those are the ingredients of a sexual relationship.People have sex with and marry those with whom they interact themost—their co-workers, the girl or boy next door—and the people mostlike themselves—those of the same class, religion, race, and appearance.The forces of sexual attraction should pull siblings together like magnets.Even if familiarity breeds some contempt and only a tiny fraction of siblingshit it off, there should be millions of brothers and sisters wanting tohave.sex and get married. There are virtually none. Not in our society,not in any well-studied human society, not in most animals in the wild.(Prepubertal children sometimes engage in sexual play; I'm talking aboutreal intercourse between mature siblings.)Do brothers and sisters avoid copulating because their parents discourageit? Almost certainly not. Parents try to socialize their children tobe more affectionate with each other ("Go ahead—kiss your sister!"), notless. And if they did discourage sex, it would be the only case in all ofhuman experience in which a sexual prohibition worked. Teenage brothersand sisters do not sneak off for trysts in parks and the back seats ofcars.The incest taboo—a public prohibition against sex or marriagebetween close relatives—has been an obsession of anthropology for a