Chapter 9.                   Part C               

     But if humans mostly act as they do because of programming from their parents, then why or how did some behavior patterns ever get established in the first place in the earliest of human societies? And why did many behaviors obviously possible for humans vanish totally or never get tried at all? Why don’t people in some societies on this planet eat Rowan berries or make their children into slaves? The answer is obvious: the morés that help us to live are kept; the ones that don’t serve the needs of survival aren't. We keep alive the morés that keep us alive.     

      

                                                                    

The second step in the explanation of social mores and cultures then is this: behavior patterns get established in a society, and passed on from generation to generation, if they enable the people of that society, first, to live, individually and as a community, second, to reproduce, and third, to program the behaviors into their young. If a new moré or behavior pattern is to last, it must foster the achieving of all of these results at levels of efficiency at least as high as the levels of efficiency that the community had before its people began to acquire this new behavior pattern. This is the theory around which the field of sociocultural evolution is built, a field of study which only began to develop as a branch of science in the twentieth century due to the work of people like Marshall Sahlins and Talcott Parsons. (3.)   

  Note that each of these steps in the adoption of a moré into the cultural code of the society in question is vital to the survival of the moré itself and that none of the parts or phases of this moré’s becoming established is necessarily entailed by any of the others. A behavior recently acquired by one person on a trial basis may make that individual healthier and/or happier, but this fact does not automatically mean that he will reproduce more prolifically, nor that he will nurture more effectively or teach his morés to his kids more efficiently. Other factors can, and do, intervene.

            Many examples can be cited as evidence to support this generalization. Some of the tribes in Indonesia once taught every member of the community to go into the forest to defecate. The individual had to dig a hole in the earth, defecate in it, then cover the excrement with earth before returning to the tribe’s living spaces. Each child was taught that he or she must hide his or her excrement in order that no hostile shaman might find it and use it to cast an evil spell on such a careless child. (4.)

            In the terms of Western societies, the advantages of the practice are seen to lie in the reduced risk to the community of diseases such as cholera. Similar practices are taught to people in our societies (and described in cultural codes as early as that found in the Old Testament of the Bible).