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By Root 940 0

chocolate, while my ge netically evolved nutritional need for sweet and fat is the ultimate cause. Although this is clear enough in a simple physiological case of a food, applying such an model to social and cultural practices raises complicated issues. Sweet and fat are one kind of evolutionary ultimate cause, certainly help explain the existence of chocolates in the modern world, they are not the only cause at work in this case. There might, for be other ultimate causes at play—connected in this case with generosity, or an impulse to give pleasurable gifts in courtship contexts, desire to display and appreciate confectionary skill or to enjoy a food. The conventional approach to such issues for the last century has been to treat the desire for sweet and fat as the ultimate cause for the existence of chocolates, and everything else mentioned as a mere cultural overlay on the biological demand. A Darwinian approach says, no, there may well be a whole array of innate instincts here: gift-giving and skill-display instincts, for example, which evolutionary origins. These evolved interests and behavior patterns in their turn be subject to cultural forming and modification, too may draw on innate sources as much as the desire for sweet When we turn from chocolates back to the arts, we encounter richer combination of psychological adaptations and cultural traditions out of which emerge the worlds of the arts.

In order better to understand how innate instincts interact with traditions, I want to turn to another powerful, universal instinct clear cultural implications: incest avoidance. Here the ultimate cause the instinct (keeping the gene pool sound by minimizing the effects DNA copying mistakes) is far removed from the proximate cause, being least uninterested in and at most repelled by the idea of sexual intercourse whose research is cited by E. O. Wilson as providing an exemplary case interplay between instinctual nature and historical culture in human social behavior. The cravings of hunger are immediately clear: they make attractive. In contrast, the Westermarck effect is based more on a absence of a craving or interest in an area where cravings and interests are so central: sex. It applies to close blood relatives but has a effect in the general anthropological rule that children who live together between the ages of three and six, blood relatives or not, are unlikely a sexual bond in later life. This fact is confirmed by studies of the kibbutzim, where children raised together from an early age have low marriage rate, and in China, where a study has shown that when little girl goes to live in the house of her intended husband, a little boy similar age, the failure rate of the subsequent marriage is much higher with marriages that are arranged in adolescence or later. As Wilson described it, the Westermarck effect delivers to people an unconscious command: Have no sexual interest in those whom you knew intimately during earliest years of your life.

Incest avoidance is an instinct that humans share with other sexually reproducing animals, including all of the other primates, whose young, Homo sapiens, often disperse at the point of sexual maturity. But with humans there is also a cultural packaging for incest avoidance. In all but a small minority of cultures, incest avoidance is explained, elaborated, justified, and codified by mythology, folktales, laws, or superstitions: it is transformed into the incest taboo. Such narratives may ways of rationalizing the Westermarck effect, but they may also from a completely different source: the fact that people sometimes directly observe the effects of inbreeding—the greater frequency variety of deformities, including dwarfism and mental retardation, as early mortality. One study of sixty nonliterate societies indicates about a third were directly aware that deformities result from incestuous unions. Not all nonliterate cultures show such awareness, presumably because their prohibitions on incest are successful enough that they had available to them the comparative observations