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ESTHER BREGER ASSISTANT EDITOR AT THE NEW REPUBLIC

PLUS, TWO OTHER COMPELLING DETAILS FROM MY LAST FEW WEEKS OF READING.

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OF TOO REAL REALITY TV AND AMISH JOURNOS

A new three-episode Bravo reality series, “The People’s Couch,” consists of regular Joes in their houses watching and commenting on television from the previous week. — DEADLINE

NASA is looking for volunteers to lie in bed for several days.

Participants will be paid $18,000. — FORBES

ACCORDING TO A STUDY, FOOTBALL FANS’ SATURATED-FAT INTAKE INCREASES AS MUCH AS 28 PERCENT IN THE 24 HOURS AFTER THEIR TEAM LOSES AND DECREASES SIGNIFICANTLY AFTER VICTORIES. THE EFFECT WAS MOST PRONOUNCED ON MONDAYS, AND SHARPER IN CITIES WITH BELOVED TEAMS. (NUMBER ONE WAS FREQUENTLY PITTSBURGH.) — THE NEW YORK TIMES

WALMART CAN SOLVE THE INEQUALITY PROBLEM AND IT’LL ONLY COST YOU $12.50 A YEAR. B Y M I C H A E L K I N S L E Y

T HE PROBLEM OF INCOME inequality in the United States is really three different problems.

One is the concentration of income and wealth at the very top—the notorious 1 percent making more than about $250,000 a year. A second problem is the stagnating incomes of the middle class, in particular the lower–middle class: those with family income of about $32,000 to $50,000 a year. The third problem is poverty: the 15 percent of Americans—or about 46 million people—earning less than the poverty line of about $23,500 a year, which is the government’s estimate of the minimum amount needed to feed, clothe, and house a family of four.

In terms of importance, it seems to me, the problem of poverty comes first. When people actually don’t have enough to eat,

Which leads to the second reason why skeptics about enhanced government involvement in the network might be wrong. The public mistrusts the NSA not just because of what it does, but also because of its extraordinary secrecy. To obtain the credibility it needs to secure permission from the American people to protect our networks, the NSA and the intelligence community must fundamentally recalibrate their attitude toward disclosure and scrutiny. There are signs that this is happening—and that, despite the undoubted damage he inflicted on our national security in other respects, we have Edward Snowden to thank.

“Before the unauthorized disclosures, we were always conservative about discussing specifics of our collection programs, based on the truism that the more adversaries know about what we’re doing, the more they can avoid our surveillance,” testified Director of National Intelligence James Clapper last month. “But the disclosures, for better or worse, have lowered the threshold for discussing these matters in public.”

In the last few weeks, the NSA has done the unthinkable in releasing dozens of documents that implicitly confirm general elements of its

collection capabilities. These revelations are bewildering to most people in the intelligence community and no doubt hurt some elements of collection. But they are justified by the countervailing need for public debate about, and public confidence in, NSA activities that had run ahead of what the public expected. And they suggest that secrecy about collection capacities is one value, but not the only or even the most important one. They also show that not all revelations of NSA capabilities are equally harmful. Disclosure that it sweeps up metadata is less damaging to its mission than disclosure of the fine-grained details about how it collects and analyzes that metadata.

It is unclear whether the government’s new attitude toward secrecy is merely a somewhat panicked reaction to Snowden, or if it’s also part of a larger rethinking about the need for greater tactical openness to secure strategic political legitimacy. Let us hope, for the sake of our cybersecurity, that it is the latter. ○

Jack Goldsmith, a contributing editor, teaches at Harvard Law School and is a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law.

1 percent in ways that don’t add to general prosperity. And if they don’t add enough to general prosperity to cover the amount they take away from it, then their share is coming out of everybody else’s.

Solving the problems of the poor and middle class will require a substantial contribution from the affluent—not just the top 1 percent, or even the top 10 percent, but the top 15 or 20 percent. But there’s no need to be vindictive about it. Affluent people should fork out a bit because they’ve been lucky, not because they’ve been evil. It only takes $50,000 a year or so to put you in the top half of income distribution in this country, so the upper–middle class can expect any serious readjustment of income distribution to cost them initially rather than benefit them.

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. (In some states, and the District of Columbia, it’s a bit higher.) For a 40-hour week, 50 weeks a year, that’s $14,500, which is just over three-fifths of the minimum amount the government says you need to survive.

Besides being brutally unfair, this is illogical. Shouldn’t people who are working full-time earn enough to live at least at the poverty line? They’re working as hard as they can. What else can they do? The entire language of the old debate about the War on Poverty is outmoded. These are not, for the most part, “welfare queens” driving their Cadillacs to the welfare office to collect large checks, which they use to buy drugs and liquor for their boyfriends. These are hard-working people, doing everything that we as a society ask of them. Surely we can afford to say: If you work a full-time job, you may be hard-up, but you won’t be poor.

The most straightforward way to make sure that every job pays at least poverty- level wages would be to simply require it. The current minimum wage doesn’t quite do that. A minimum wage of $12.50 an hour would be $25,000 a year—just a hair above the poverty line.

Employers would scream, this will destroy jobs. In fact, they are already screaming in Washington, where the city council passed a “living-wage” law requiring big-box stores to pay their employees at least $12.50 an hour. The bill was aimed at Walmart, which is planning to open six stores in and around Washington. Walmart made clear that three of the stores, and possibly all six, would not be built if the living-wage law

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you’ve got an emergency on your hands. Next comes the middle class, where no one is starving, but the American promise of steady improvement (the expectation that your children will live better than you did) is being betrayed.

Not trivial but least important is the problem of the rich getting richer. Many would say that’s hardly a problem. That it’s an achievement. And in some cases that’s true: Some people get rich in ways that add more to general prosperity than they take out. But others climb into the

were enacted. The mayor, Vincent Gray, vetoed the bill on the grounds that it was unfair to discriminate against one type of store, and because it would cost jobs. The council failed to override the veto.

It seems beyond dispute that raising the minimum wage will cost jobs. Except in rare circumstances, when the price of something (in this case, labor) goes up, demand for it goes down. There was a school of thought that sometimes raising the price of labor actually increases employment. This is hard to believe. But you don’t need to believe it in order to favor a higher minimum wage.

The minimum wage costs jobs. It makes our economy less efficient. Opponents of raising the minimum wage act as if this is the end of the story. But it isn’t. Many government policies reduce economic efficiency and make our society a bit poorer than it otherwise would be. But we’ve made a decision that other social goals make it worth the cost. So it is with the minimum wage.

The minimum wage has been around since the New Deal. If it’s so clear that raising it costs jobs, why do we not hear more poor people complaining about it? (I’ve never heard any poor person complain that the minimum wage is too high.) The reason? For a low-income individual, the minimum wage is a gamble. You might lose your job. But you might get a raise. The average wage of a Walmart “associate” is $8.81 an hour. A raise to $12.50 would be 41 percent. If you make only the federal minimum wage of $7.25 (as many Walmart associates do, though the exact number is subject to dispute), your raise to a “living wage” would be 72 percent! That is a deal worth considering.

Trouble is, Walmart is not offering that deal. Walmart sells as cheaply as it can, and that requires hiring people as cheaply as it can. Forcing Walmart to pay higher wages than its competitors is unfair, and forcing it to pay people more than it has to is unfair to its customers, many of them poor themselves, who would have to pay higher prices.

A confession: I love shopping at Walmart. In fact, I love just wandering around Walmart, admiring the cornucopia of stuff for sale and the miraculously low prices. I can hardly wait for six new Walmarts in the Washington area. (Right now there are none except in distant suburbs.)

However, I don’t want to exploit my fellow Americans by underpaying them. I would happily pay a bit more for the knowledge that nobody involved in the

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doesn’t run crime stories and cuts out mentions of elderly women who live alone lest it put them in danger. One thing

it has in common with more modern media companies?

Contributors are unpaid. — THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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14 making and selling of whatever I purchase has been paid less than $12.50 an hour. How much is “a bit”? According to a study two years ago by scholars at the University of California at Berkley and City University of New York, the average Walmart customer spends about $1,200 a year there. (Good news for me: I am below average—but I can rectify that!) Even if the entire cost of a wage increase (to $12, not $12.50) were passed on to customers, the cost to an average customer would be just more than 1 percent, or $12.50 a year.

Who wouldn’t pay 12 bucks and change for the right to roam the Walmart aisles without guilt? Well poor people might not be able to. But, depending on how it’s done, they may not have to.

There’s no need to force Walmart into raising its wages and prices. Let the market work! These days almost everything you buy carries a label making the claim that in some way it is morally superior. It is “organic.” It is “gluten free.” It is “cruelty free”—cruelty to animals, that is. Everything from dishwasher detergent to entire office buildings gets certified by how “green” it is.

Why not create a label symbol indicating that the product you are about to buy is “poverty-free”—i.e., no American involved in making it or getting it to you makes less than $12.50 an hour?

Obviously, this should not be limited to Walmart, but Walmart could lead the way. On some items, they might want to try putting poverty-free and non-poverty- free items side by side on the shelf and see how many people go for each.

Yes, yes, I know there are problems. Imports, for one. A reason for Walmart’s low prices is that much of the labor that goes into its products is that of foreigners in distant lands who are lucky to get 12 cents an hour, let alone $12. Furthermore, that’s a good thing, the bottom rung on the ladder to the middle class.

As long as it’s voluntary, the extra cost of a living wage can be passed along to the customers, and any competitive disadvantage should disappear. Or here’s an idea: Hidden cameras could photograph the greedheads who wouldn’t pay 11 cents more for poverty- free peanut butter and bought the cheaper stuff instead. Their pictures could be posted at checkout.

No? Well, maybe that goes too far. ○

Michael Kinsley is editor-at-large of THE NEW REPUBLIC.

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e.g., “Bro, you’re gonna rock your presentation. Initiate beast mode!”

Illustration by Icinori

WHO USES IT: IVY LEAGUE B-SCHOOL STUDENTS GETTING IN THE ZONE / GYM RATS / SEATTLE SEAHAWKS

RUNNING BACK MARSHAWN LYNCH

WHEN YOU’RE A YOUNG CAPITALIST ON THE MAKE, YOU DON’T MERELY prepare for high-pressure meetings. You go into “beast mode.”

That’s the word that Harvard Business School–types have designated for the aggressive headspace they enter before important tête-à-têtes and job interviews. A young project manager turning down after-hours beers, for instance, may explain that he has to pull an all-nighter, e-mailing, “ACTIVATE EXCEL BEAST MODE.”

The term originates with Sega’s Altered Beast, a video game starring a Roman centurion who could morph into mythical creatures. Its doltish brand of masculinity (the centurion must rescue Athena—you know, the Greek goddess of war?) made the leap to the football world in 2007 when Marshawn Lynch, then a Berkeley undergraduate, told an inter- viewer he was in “beast mode” when he was on the field. The phrase became Lynch’s nickname and is now employed by jocks everywhere. Today, Twitter is lousy with people getting into #beastmode ahead of their gym routines.

Wall Street likes its slang to be dudely. There was, says the anthropolo- gist Grant McCracken, “a particularly annoying period when people kept asking (or saying) that something ‘hunted.’ As in, ‘I think that new idea really hunts.’ ” The late Nora Ephron remembered a time when business- men broadcasted their machismo by speaking, it seemed, only in God- father quotes. McCracken observes that Wall Street lingo has typically sounded “muscular, capable, decisive, and in-the-know,” and not nearly as frenzied as “beast mode.” But today’s MBAs were reared on video games and are entering a Wall Street that recently tanked the global economy and has become the frenetic domain of quants that buy and drop stocks in a fraction of a second. Who could survive the melee that is modern finance, save for someone with the improbable strength of a video-game action hero? – MOLLY REDDEN

Copyright of New Republic is the property of TNR II, LLC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

8/7/15, 06:36Primate Sociality to Human Cooperation.: Discovery Service for Park University

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Primate Sociality to Human Cooperation.

#104

TO: Park University Students Taking the Writing Competency Test

FROM:

SUBJECT: Writing Competency Test

THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR IN PASSING THE WCT IS READING AND UNDERSTANDING THE MATERIAL ON THESE PAGES: THE COVER SHEETS, EVALUATION GUIDELINES, AND NOTE ON SOURCES.

FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH THE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES SPECIFIED BELOW MAY RESULT IN AUTOMATIC DISQUALIFICATION.

Here is the latest packet for the Writing Competency Test. A fee of $25.00 is assessed for each administration of the test, to cover copying, processing, and scoring costs. You should bring pens, an I.D., and a paid WCT fee receipt to the test. You may use erasable ink but not pencil. Passing the Writing Competency Test is a University-wide requirement and a prerequisite for EN306 and equivalent courses.

To prepare for the test, you should study the attached materials. They include

· the assessment scale that will be used by test evaluators. You should read it carefully so that you will have a clear idea of the criteria by which your test will be scored. Two evaluators will score each test.

· a selection of materials to print out , read, and consider for planning your essay.

For the test, you will be asked to write a critical essay on some point or idea discussed in the packet or suggested by it. Your essay should be clearly and significantly related to the packet material. There are many possibilities; you will need to develop your own topic.

Your essay must make at least some use of all the articles in the packet, but it should not be a summary of the articles . Don’t plod through them paragraph by paragraph; instead, use them to develop your claim. You decide how to use them: some might be discussed in detail and others only mentioned briefly.

You should, therefore, read the articles carefully and critically; think about and maybe discuss with others the ideas they contain. Here are some suggestions to help you focus your thinking:

· What topics are common to all the readings?

· Which issue or idea discussed in these articles do you find most interesting?

· What evidence or support from your own experience could you use to develop your essay?

· What evidence or support do the readings provide?

In defining a FOCUS and DEVELOPING your ideas (see the attached Evaluation Standards for the meaning of these terms), you may want to consider these questions as well:

· What social, political, or economic questions do you see raised by the articles? How do you respond to them?

· What value questions do you see raised? How do you respond to them? Can you articulate an arguable claim about these questions?

· Are there aesthetic or scientific dimensions to the issue that would be interesting to raise?

You may do any planning and prewriting you want, but you may not bring any prewriting or drafts with you to the test. You should bring only the printed packet, including the opening pages and the printed articles, to the test, and you may make any notes you want on the pages of the packet, including an outline of your essay and your documentation of sources, but your complete essay, including all documentation, must be created in one document during the test period.

You may not have substantial portions of the essay written in the packet. You must turn in the complete printed packet, with your name on it, when you complete the test.

NOTE. Be prepared to document sources you quote, paraphrase, or cite. Your essay must refer in some way to all of the articles, and it must contain a Works Cited list and parenthetical references or some comparable form of documentation. Use ONLY material from the packet as sources for your essay.

Remember that your essay may be DISQUALIFIED if you

(1) write on a topic with no significant connection to the packet material, or

(2) use sources—other than your own experience, of course—from outside the packet.

Please be careful in planning your essay.

WCT EVALUATION STANDARDS

Your WCT essay will be evaluated on four criteria. Each one will be scored separately, so that a strong score in one area may make up for a weak score in another, but the four scores must total at least 8. You must, in addition, get acceptable scores (2 or above) in at least three categories. Each essay will be scored by two readers; in the event of a conflict, a third reader will decide.

These are the categories; each one will be scored from 1 (lowest) to 4.

FOCUS. A 4 is awarded to a critical essay whose controlling idea seems not only clear but particularly thoughtful or imaginative.

A 3 indicates a focus that is clear and sustained throughout but that may not be especially original in light of the readings.

A 2 in this category, as in the others, indicates minimum competence: the focus is clear but commonplace or conventional.

If the piece cannot be considered a critical essay, either because it simply summarizes one or more of the articles or because its focus does not offer an arguable claim, it receives a 1 in this category.

DEVELOPMENT. A 4 is awarded to an essay that, whatever its length, seems to the reader to be a full discussion. It makes use of both material from all the supplied readings and also ideas, experiences, or information personally supplied by the writer. All the material is smoothly integrated and persuasively supports the essay's focus. The writer seems to be a thoughtful, critical reader of the sources with a genuine personal "voice."

A 3 indicates that the writer has incorporated all the source material both appropriately in terms of content and smoothly in terms of style, and has also contributed personal ideas and experiences to the discussion. The essay's focus is clearly supported.

A 2 in this category indicates an essay that makes at least some use of each of the readings and some other material to support its focus, though the use may not always be relevant, and the sources not discussed critically.

A 1 is given to an essay that makes no use of the sources, does not at least mention every article, whose use fails to provide coherent support for the essay's focus, or whose use consists of unmarked quotation (copying from the sources word-for-word).

ORGANIZATION

The 4 essay is not only easy to follow, its structure seems effortless because of smooth transitions and a convincing rhetorical pattern.

A 3 is awarded to the essay that has clear paragraphing and a logical sequence of topics.

A 2 essay is generally easy to follow, with reasonable paragraphing, though the discussion may wander briefly.

The 1 essay is difficult to follow, either because the sequence of topics is not logical, because it is repetitive, or because the paragraphing is not helpful.

MECHANICS

The 4 essay reads exceptionally smoothly, and the reader notices no errors in grammar, usage, punctuation, or spelling. The Works Cited list is complete, and there is appropriate internal documentation.

The 3 essay may contain an occasional problem in sentence structure or diction, but the reader is never seriously distracted. Documentation is complete.

In a 2 essay, there may be enough mechanical problems to distract the reader temporarily, but it is always possible to understand what the writer means. Documentation is essentially complete.

A score of 1 indicates either severe problems with sentence structure or word choice--severe enough so that the meaning is difficult or impossible to understand--or serious deficiencies in documentation--no Works Cited list or inadequate documentation of material within the essay.

SOURCES

WCT Packet #104

These are the articles for Packet 104. You need to print them in order to create a complete packet in which to make your own notes and to bring to the testing session. Some are available as .pdf records; some as HTML. Look for the appropriate button to retrieve the full text.

Remember that you’ll have no devices available during the Test—only your own packet—and that you must turn in the packet with your name and ID number at the end of the Test.

The second, third, and fourth sources come from University databases; the first is used by permission of the authors.

http://www.isaet.org/images/extraimages/P914027.pdf

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8/7/15, 06:38Homo virtuous?: Discovery Service for Park University

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Database:

Homo virtuous? By: Douglas, Kate, New Scientist, 02624079, 11/10/2012, Vol. 216, Issue 2890

Academic Search Premier

Homo virtuous?

Humans are capable of incredible kindness and cruelty. What drove the evolution of our moral compass, asks Kate Douglas

A FEW years ago, I attended a conference on animal behaviour in Atlanta, Georgia. The end-of- meeting party included a trip to the zoo and while we roamed freely between the caged beasts the conference organisers conducted a whimsical poll to discover what animals people thought were the "best" and "worst". As you might expect the nominations were eclectic, but one name cropped up more frequently than any other - Homo sapiens. More striking still, humans were equally likely to end up in the "best" and "worst" categories. Some respondents even chose humans for both.

There is no getting away from it: Homo sapiens is both the basest of animals and the most noble. Ours is a species capable of horrific cruelty, genocide, war, corruption and greed. Yet we can also be caring, kind, fair and philanthropic - more so than any other creature. What lies behind this dual nature?

Our capacity for good and evil has exercised philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Jean- Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes, but today some of the most exciting ideas are coming from an understanding of our evolution. In recent years, researchers have addressed such thorny questions as: why would altruism evolve, how did human conscience emerge, why does it feel good to be nice, and what causes us to give in to prejudice and hatred? The potential power of these insights is intriguing. By understanding the kinds of environments that foster the saint rather than the sinner, we can try to create societies that promote our better nature. It's not just a pipe dream. Some evolutionists are already putting their theories into practice.

Listen American Accent

Park University Library

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The key to virtue is altruism. Anyone can do the right thing given enough incentive, but what distinguishes genuinely good deeds is their selfless nature - a rare phenomenon in the wild. Although colonial insects such as bees and ants can show an impressive level of self-sacrifice, the individuals are so closely related that helping others is tantamount to being selfish, at least in evolutionary terms, since it ensures the survival of their own genes. Relatedness can also explain why many birds, and some other animals, will help rear each other's offspring. It is far harder to find generosity extending outside the family. Even our closest evolutionary cousin the chimpanzee is basically selfish, although in one experiment chimps displayed a small amount of altruism similar to that found in young children, being just as likely to pass an object to an unfamiliar chimp even if some physical exertion was required (PLoS Biology, vol 5, p e184). In a nice twist to our preconceptions, vampire bats offer one of the very few bona fide exceptions to the rule, sharing blood meals with their roost-mates (Nature, vol 308, p 181).

Yet humans do appear to behave selflessly. Since the 1980s behavioural economists have used games to assess our altruistic tendencies. First came the "ultimatum game", wherein player A is given some money and told to split it with a second anonymous player B. If B accepts the split, both keep their share, if not, neither gets a cent. It is free money, so B should accept any amount no matter how small and A should offer as little as possible. But that is not what happens. Instead, in university labs around the world, the most common offer is 50 per cent, with an average of around 45 per cent. Even in a refined version of the experiment called the "dictator game", where A can choose either to give half or 10 per cent and B has no option to reject, three quarters of people make the more generous offer. It would appear that humans are very nice (and not very logical).

But are we really? Generosity may flourish in the sanitised environment of the lab, but experience suggests that people behave somewhat differently in the messy maul of the real world. And, sure enough, the evidence for virtue is less convincing out there. In one study, collectors of sports cards offered dealers a fixed amount of money in exchange for their best card at that price. John List from the University of Chicago found that when the transactions were done under his watchful eye, dealers played fair, coming up with a card that was worth what the collector had offered. But when dealers were not told they were taking part in an experiment, many ripped off their customers. Such cheating was particularly rife when they were off their home turf, away from their day-to-day customers (Journal of Political Economy, vol 114, p 1).

Why be nice? Anyone who considers humans to be the worst of animals will conclude that people behave well only if they think they are being watched, proving that there is no such thing as altruism. Another interpretation is that we simply need to redefine virtue in biological terms. After all, altruism cannot be without benefit for the do-gooder, otherwise it would not have evolved by natural selection in the first place. Working on this principle, evolutionary biologists have come up with a

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variety of explanations for human niceness.

The first possibility is rather disheartening. Traditional hunter-gatherer groups tend to consist of closely related individuals, with kin constituting around a quarter of the members (Science, vol 331, p 1286). Individuals who helped their close relatives ended up passing on more genes, including those pushing us to help our own flesh and blood. So, like bees in a hive, we have evolved strong nepotistic instincts and, by this argument, niceness to non-relatives is simply a case of overspill.

However, it takes time and energy to help others, so evolution would have favoured people who made fewer of these costly mistakes, unless the generosity provided benefits that outweighed the costs. Reciprocity might be one such reason to do right by others. It can explain the altruistic behaviour of vampire bats, for example: they starve to death after a couple of nights without a blood meal, so sharing with a roost-mate that is likely to return the favour is an obvious strategy to help them pull through tough periods. Humans live in groups, are highly dependent on others, and we remember who owes us a favour, so we are perfectly placed to benefit from reciprocal altruism. Indeed, it might explain why List's sports-card dealers tended to play fairer on their home turf, where they are likely to bump into customers again.

It's not just our immediate acquaintances we have to worry about when considering the judgemental eyes of others. Humans are incredibly nosy: we like nothing better than to watch those around us and then gossip about our insights to others. This is how reputations are made and destroyed - and reputations matter. Virtues such as generosity, fairness and conscientiousness are universally valued and people seen to display them are rewarded - others like these individuals, want to do business with them and are more sexually attracted to them. So a good reputation can boost your chances of survival and reproduction. Taking this to its logical conclusion, Christopher Boehm from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, argues that over the course of evolution rumour and hearsay may have forced us to become more altruistic - albeit in a biological self-serving sort of way.

Besides offering benefits for the individual, altruism would also have determined the way groups competed over resources. Those that pulled together would have beaten groups whose individuals were more selfish, ensuring their survival. This "group selection" has been a controversial idea, but it is increasingly being accepted as an important driving force behind the evolution of altruism, says Edward O. Wilson at Harvard University.

So we have ended up nicer and more caring than chimps. Even so, our egoistic tendencies must still be far stronger than our altruistic ones - after all, natural selection helps those who help themselves. Indeed, by becoming more altruistic, we created an environment where the selfish can enjoy the benefits of cooperative living - be it a share of mammoth meat or an equitable banking system - without paying the costs. Of course, if everyone did this there would

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be no cooperative group to begin with. That's the dilemma our Jekyll-and-Hyde nature creates, but humans have evolved a few strategies to discourage free riders.

One is our seemingly innate desire to punish those who step out of line. People playing the ultimatum game will often reject mean offers from their partners just to see the Scrooges suffer, even if it means they both lose the prize. In another version of the game, people will even pay their own money to see selfish players punished for their stinginess. In the real world we commonly use gossip, censure and ostracism to punish minor misdemeanours, while the police, courts and prisons impose sentences to discourage more serious crimes. And although our prehistoric ancestors would have lacked institutions to enforce their rules, Boehm believes they used capital punishment as the ultimate sanction against free riders, based on his discovery that many modern hunter-gatherer societies have the death penalty. If he is correct, punishment has made our species a little bit less evil by removing the most antisocial genes from the human gene pool.

Fear of being punished is not the only thing that keeps our inner egoists in check. Often we are virtuous simply because it feels right. "You cooperate because it's a good thing to do," says Herb Gintis at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. He calls this "strong reciprocity" because we end up doing things that are not personally beneficial but will be good for society if everyone does them - things like voting and giving money to people in need. Gintis believes this urge is behind all moral acts. What generates it?

This is where conscience comes in - not the esoteric entity with religious connotations, but an evolved, subconscious risk calculator that helps us weigh up the pros and cons of different moral options. It works like this. We learn the complex social rules of our particular culture and they become linked in our brains with emotions such as pride and honour, shame and guilt, giving them moral significance. These are the scales upon which moral judgements are weighed, and they tip the balance in favour of virtue; vice may be in your better interests, but it is associated with negative emotions, whereas virtue prompts positive ones.

The pleasure we get from performing a good deed is probably induced by a cocktail of neurochemicals but one seems particularly important. Normally associated with feel-good activities such as sex and bonding, the link between oxytocin and morality was discovered a decade ago by Paul Zak at Claremont Graduate University in California. His experiments reveal, among other things, that people with more oxytocin are more generous and caring, and that our oxytocin level increases when someone puts trust in us. Zak describes oxytocin as "the key to moral behaviour".

The mama-bear effect So it would appear we have a neurobiological mechanism that tricks us into placing other people's interests above our own. This makes us less selfish but, perversely, is also behind

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some of our most heinous behaviour. That's because the flip side of niceness to members of one's group is nastiness to outsiders. This xenophobia is underpinned by oxytocin too (Science, vol 328, p 1408) and is sometimes called the "mama-bear effect" because it mirrors a parent's urge to defend her offspring against a threat. As a result, the very system that keeps people working for the good of others can promote atrocities such as racism, genocide and war.

One consequence of this evolved conscience is that our concepts of "good" and "evil" are not universally shared, but rooted in the values of our culture. Take fairness. In modern western cultures, we tend to equate it with equity - one for me and one for you - but other cultures have different ideas. When researchers took the ultimatum game to 15 traditional societies around the world, they found that the average offer of player A ranged from 15 per cent in one society to 58 per cent in another (New Scientist, 10 March 2001, p 38).

The fact that people adapt to the values of their culture makes morality a movable feast. What's more we are all members of multiple cultures - from our closest family to the whole nation - so even an individual's moral compass is not fixed. Undoubtedly, some people are more predisposed to virtue than others but in a toxic culture almost everyone is capable of evil, from bullying and corruption to torture and terrorism. On the plus side, the converse is also true: the right cultural context brings out the good in us. That may not seem like a revolutionary insight, but some people believe it could make the world a better place.

Perhaps the most prominent of them is David Sloan Wilson at Binghamton University in New York state. For the past few years he has been applying what we have learned about the evolution of morality to his home city. Like any city, Binghamton has neighbourhoods where antisocial behaviour is rife and others where people actively work to help each other. He has mapped these peaks and valleys of prosociality and found when people move neighbourhoods they adapt their behaviour to fit the local culture. This is exactly what you would expect, given the factors that influence our moral behaviour. "People may want to be prosocial but in an environment where others are not you lose out," says Wilson. His conclusion is radical. "There's no point trying to make individuals more prosocial, you need to increase the prosociality of the entire neighbourhood."

That is exactly what Wilson is trying to do. One approach involves giving residents the opportunity to create parks on local wasteland. These serve both to improve the physical environment, which Wilson finds has a strong influence on moral behaviour, and provide a common goal to build cooperative communities. Another project aims to make the classroom more cooperative and appealing to underperforming students by implementing Nobel- prizewinning economist Elinor Ostrom's principles of group cooperation. Wilson has also set up the world's first evolutionary think tank, the Evolution Institute, to bring these ideas to policymakers worldwide.

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Evolutionary insights underline the importance of other measures to promote virtuous cultures, too. One is to encourage transparency, since we know that being watched puts us on our best behaviour, if only to enhance our reputations. Also crucial is the rule of law, including swift and just punishment for non-compliance (New Scientist, 5 November 2011, p 42). Less obvious, but highlighted by the study of 15 traditional societies, is economic development. "Modern market economies promote freedom, dignity, tolerance and democracy," says Gintis. Even globalisation presents an opportunity for good. People's wider social and information networks mean that the boundaries between groups are breaking down, reducing our xenophobic tendencies.

It will be interesting to see how far evolutionary theory in action can bring out the best in us. What is not in doubt is that our worst side will remain. Evolution has made us both altruistic and selfish - good and evil - and we cannot be otherwise. "It's impossible for us," says Edward O. Wilson. "If virtue was the only evolutionary force we would be angelic robots."

Morality is a moveable feast depending on our society's culture and our circumstances

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By Kate Douglas

Kate Douglas is a feature editor with New Scientist

© 2012, New Scientist, Reed Business Information UK, Ltd., a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Copyright of New Scientist is the property of Reed Business Information and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

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