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196 C H A P T E R T E N The Evolutionary Psychology of ‘‘Little House on the Prairie’’ From 1974 to 1983, millions of American families turned on their television sets every week to watch the Ingalls family struggle with life on the nineteenthcentury American prairie. Indeed, during its nine-season run the show ‘‘Little House on the Prairie’’ became one of the highest rated dramas on television. Each episode was a kind of sixty-minute—well, fifty-two minutes with commercials —morality play wherein we would learn a useful life lesson. Sometimes we would learn that the best gift is one that comes from the heart; sometimes we would learn that running away never solved any problems; and sometimes we would learn that practical experience can be just as valuable as book-smarts. But always the same general message was conveyed on each and every episode. That message was devastatingly simple: that life on the prairie—or anywhere else for that matter—works best when helpful people help other helpful people. In a now famous article, published in 1971, the proto-evolutionary psychologist Robert Trivers came up with a name for what made that best life possible on the prairie. He called it reciprocal altruism.∞ To my mind, the general idea of reciprocal altruism, and all of the various research and theory that has accreted around it, represents some of the most fascinating work in the field of evolutionary psychology to date. As we shall see, the theory of reciprocal altruism is fascinating because it nicely integrates evolutionary psychology with some critical concepts in economics and game theory; because it carries some startling implications for the content specific nature of the process of human reasoning; and because it can account extremely well for distinctly political emotions, including our sense of justice and fair play. To begin our analysis, we need to get clear on exactly what is, and is not, ‘‘Little House on the Prairie’’ 197 meant by the phrase reciprocal altruism. Here we will do well to keep in mind the following lament o√ered by Trivers: ‘‘Models that attempt to explain altruistic behavior in terms of natural selection are models designed to take the altruism out of altruism.’’≤ What did Trivers mean by this? Consider the behavior of a parent who works twenty hours of overtime a week so that he can a√ord to send his (biological) child to an expensive private elementary school, rather than the neighborhood public school. We might call such behavior laudatory. But, according to Trivers, we should not call it altruistic. Clearly, by benefiting his child this parent is benefiting himself, by benefiting that half of his genes that are inside of his child. This is an example of what is known in evolutionary biology as kin selection. The idea is simple. Individual genes could replicate very quickly if they built bodies that aided other bodies that contained high percentages of the genes in question. Hence, we would expect humans to come equipped with an especially strong desire to aid their kin. It turns out that we even have a mental module that is apparently dedicated to enabling us to notice and keep track of the type and degree of relatedness of others to ourselves. This is exactly what we would expect from ‘‘selfish’’ genes. But for just this reason we may not want to encourage throughout society the type of parental behavior mentioned above. We may instead want to frankly call such behavior selfish. Do not all major religions tell us that everyone is a child of God? Should we not therefore have as much love for a random child as we have for our biological child? Should we not encourage—or perhaps compel—the parent in this example to take that extra money he has made from working overtime and give it to the neighborhood school so that all children (including his own) will benefit, at least to some degree? These are all philosophical questions. But they also have a direct relevance to the concerns of this chapter. For now, however, I want to emphasize a more specific biological point that Trivers makes very clearly at the beginning of his article . The point is that although there are numerous evolutionary models that can account for apparently self-sacrificing behaviors directed toward kin, we should not call such behaviors altruistic precisely because they do confer an evolutionary advantage on...

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