Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind Read Online Free PDF Page A

tribal groups that we are calling the cultural survival vehicles. They examine the tricks our cultures have used, what they have extracted from us, and what was in it for us. Part II investigates our cooperative cultural nature, examining the rules we have evolved for making cooperation work among unrelated individuals. This section recognizes that it is not enough to say that our allegiance to our cultures has evolved because they have returned great rewards throughout our history. The cooperative societies from which cultures are constructed are themselves fragile unless tightly controlled by social mechanisms that continue to make cooperation more profitable than unbridled self-interest. Part III examines how life in the presence of culture has sculpted our minds to use our social systems to our advantage. We expect a strong part of our nature to have been influenced by the rewards that come from steering just that little bit more of the cultural wealth our way. Part IV is about the modern dilemma of large nation-states. In countries such as China and India, over 1 billion people fall under the rule of a small elite, and in all of the major countries of the world millions are ruled by a few. That creates a dilemma for the thesis of this book: If humans have evolved a tribal nature that revolves around life in relatively small and exclusive cooperative social groups, how do we explain the enormous social groupings of the modern world—the observation that so many can be willingly led by so few?

PART I

    MIND CONTROL,
PROTECTION, AND
PROSPERITY

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    Prologue
    W HY IS IT THAT we can show such allegiance to the packets of information we call our cultures, and why has this been a rewarding rather than foolhardy and even dangerous thing to do throughout our evolutionary history? For many of us, a slight directed at our culture or even just a piece of cloth that represents it elicits emotions of defensiveness, confrontation, or even aggression. Where do these emotions come from and why do they arise so naturally? The argument of this Prologue—explored in the chapters of Part I—is that culture has worked by coming to exercise a form of mind control over us. We willingly accept and even embrace this mind control, and probably without even knowing it, in return for the protection and prosperity our cultures provide. This is why our cultural identity is so much like a trait that we might have acquired from genes—surprisingly stable and robust to outside influences, likely to be passed on to our children, and to theirs. For instance, asked which team they would support in a match against England, many Scottish soccer fans often reply, “anyone but England,” and this despite the fact that Scotland has been a member of the United Kingdom for over three hundred years (although the Scots might say it is because of those three hundred years).
    There are other cases of animals’ minds and behaviors being taken over by an outside force. Evolutionary biologists have a field of study called “parasite manipulation of host behavior.” A science fiction writer might more engagingly call it invasion of the body snatchers. When dogs roam in packs they can be menacing and aggressive, but in many parts of East Africa a dog seen roaming on its own excites greater alarm because people know it is likely to carry the rabies virus. The virus manipulates the dog’s behavior to roam because a dog that does so is more likely to encounter an uninfected individual to bite. Similarly, there is a well-known fungus called Cordyceps that infects a species of carpenter ant. The fungus finds its way to the ant’s brain where it controls the ant like a puppeteer, getting it to climb to the top of blades of grass or small plants. Once there, the ant clamps its jaws shut and then dangles like a flag in the wind. Meanwhile, the fungus devours the ant from within and eventually erupts in its brain, flowering out of the top of its head, releasing spores