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

Family Values 505Foraging peoples, to be sure, really do share with nonrelatives, but notout of indiscriminate largesse or a commitment to socialist principles.The data from anthropology show that the sharing is driven by cost-benefitanalyses and a careful mental ledger for reciprocation. People sharewhen it would be suicidal not to. In general, species are driven to sharewhen the variance of success in gathering food is. high. Say in someweeks I am lucky and have more food than I can eat, but in other weeksI am unlucky and in danger of starving. How can I store extra food in thefat weeks and draw on it in the lean weeks'? Refrigeration is not anoption. I could gorge on it now and store it as blubber, but that worksonly up to a point; I can't eat enough in a day to avoid hunger for amonth. But I can store it in the bodies and minds of other people, in theform of a memory of my generosity they feel obliged to repay when fortunesreverse. When the prospects are risky, it pays to pool the risks.The theory has been confirmed in nonhuman species, such as vampirebats, and it has also been confirmed in humans in two elegant studiesthat control for differences among cultures by contrasting the formsof sharing within a culture. The Ache of Paraguay hunt game and gatherplant foods. Hunting is largely a matter of luck: on any given day an Achehunter has a forty percent chance of coming home empty-handed. Gatheringis largely a matter of effort: the longer you work, the more you bringhome, and an empty-handed gatherer is probably lazy rather thanunlucky. As predicted, the Ache share plant foods only within thenuclear family but share meat throughout the band.The !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert are perhaps the closest thingthe world has to primitive communists. Sharing is holy; boasting andhoarding are contemptible. They hunt and gather in a harsh, droughtproneecosystem, and trade food and access to waterholes. The //GanaSan, a neighboring branch of the same people, have taken to cultivatingmelons, which store water, and to herding goats. They do not yo-yobetween good times and bad as much as their cousins, and unlike them,they hoard food and have developed inequalities in wealth and status. Inboth the Ache and the San, high-variance foods are shared, low-variancefoods are hoarded.These people do not pull out calculators and compute the variances.What goes through their minds when they decide to share? Cosmidesand Tooby note that the psychology is hardly exotic; it matches our ownsense of fairness and compassion. Consider what makes people more orless willing to help the homeless. Those who urge that we all share with