Chapter 9.                          Part E 

         Honoring parents preserves, and enables the increase of, the tribe’s total store of all kinds of knowledge. Avoiding committing adultery checks the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. It also increases nurture behavior in males, as each man's degree of confidence that he is truly the biological father of the child that he is being asked to nurture increases. Not stealing and not bearing false witness are ways of living replete with benefits for the efficiency of the whole community, in commerce especially.

          By this point in our argument, explaining the benefits of more of these moral commands should be unnecessary. A major fact is becoming clear: a moral belief and the behaviors evoked by it get established in a tribe if the behaviors help the people who practice them to survive in both the short and long hauls. It is also clear that individuals usually do not see the large, long term picture of the tribe's survival. They just do what they were raised to believe is right.

           

 

                                                      child laborers in India 

   Some of the behaviors that the tribe programs into its young may not be enjoyable to those young tribe members while they are young or later when they are adults either. Work is hard. Building shelters is work. Making clothes is work. Gathering food and preserving it for the winter is work. Raising kids is work. Work is tedious. But for survival, individual happiness is not what matters. Patterns of living which maximize the resources of the tribe over many lifetimes are what matter, and these ways of living do not always make sense to all of the people who are being programmed to do them. But tribes that don't teach hard work and loyalty, to family and tribe, die out.

                        

                                                     polyandry family in Nepal       

           To illustrate further, another example of a moré that seems counter-intuitive to Western minds, but that works, can be offered here. Polyandry allows and encourages one woman to have two or more husbands, legally and with the blessings of the community. It seems counter-intuitive to us. But the practice is not only viable in some cultures, it even promotes better survival rates. In some areas of the Himalayas, when a man knows that finding work may require him to be away for an extended period, he can pick a good second husband for his wife. Then he will know that she, and the first man's children and property will be protected. If she gets pregnant while he is away, it will be by someone that he has approved of. (5.)