offered $100, I will offer you $45, taking more than half but being generous. If I offered you considerably less, say $1, you would refuse to pumas shoes 2011 accept it out of spite, and I would lose my profi t. When members of small-scale societies play the ultimatum game, everyone offers considerably more than 1%. Apparently, massively inequitable offers are rejected by most people everywhere, even when that 1% is a considerable sum. But there are still remarkable cultural differences. We tend to offer 45%. In some cultures, people offer more, and in some they offer less. Among the Machiguenga of Peru, the average sum offered was 26% and the most frequent offer was 15%, which is far below what most American subjects would consider fair. If I offered you $15 and took $85 for myself, puma trionfo shoes Is Morality Innate? you’d be sorely tempted to turn down the offer, and you would probably harbor a grudge. The Machiguenga have different standards, apparently. They may value sharing, but they clearly don’t expect each other to share as much as we do in ultimatum games. Such fi ndings suggest that there is not a fixed biological rule that drives us to share; the amount we share is variable. Even so, the fact that people do share to some degree in most cultures suggests that there is a biological predisposition toward sharing—or so the nativist would argue. I am not fully convinced. Sharing also has non- nativist explanations. A person who has obtained a valued resource has strong incentives to share. Sharing helps avoid theft and it helps win friends. Sharing is a kind of Puma online canada insurance policy. If I give you something, you will be nice to me, and you may offer me something in the future. The nativist will be quick to respond that this reasoning presupposes reciprocity. I have no reason to th speed cat big 2011 ink that you will share with me in the future unless people in general reciprocate acts of kindness. Mustn’t reciprocity be innate? Perhaps not. There may be cultural explanations for why peop puma trainers for men le reciprocate. Reciprocity promotes cooperation. If a culture has an economy that depends on cooperation, it will succeed only if reciprocity is promoted. This is true in the case of cultures that engage in heavy trade, cultures that have large-scale farms, and cultures that hunt very large game. Members of such cultures tend to offer equitable splits on the ultimatum game. The Machiguenga are foragers and horticulturalists. Their farms are small, family run, and temporary. The Machiguenga do not depend heavily on nonkin, and it is unsurprising, then, that they do not make equitable offers. Thus, there is reason to think reciprocity emerges to serve cultural subsistence practices, and the evidence from variation in ultimatum games supports that hypothesis. Indeed, some evolutionary game theorists argue that nonkin reciprocity must be a cultural construction. Biologically, our behavior is driven by genes, and our genes promote only those behaviors that increase their chances of being replicated. If generosity were genetically determined, and our genes led some of us to be generous, then free riders with stingy genes would take advantage, and the gen puma store canada erous genes would die out. If, however, generosity were driven by cultural inculcation, then all normal members of a cultural group would be equally likely to reciprocate, and the free-rider problem would be reduced. Genes alone can’t make us self-sacr puma speedcat suede ifi cing, but culture can. If this is right, then fairness and reciprocity are neither universal in form nor biologically based. I will return to this issue when I discuss animal behavior below. Jesse J. Prinz Let me consider with one more example of a putatively universal moral norm: the incest taboo. Few of us feel especially inclined to have sexual relations with close kin. puma trionfo We are morally outraged when we hear about cases of incest, and just about every culture on record condemns incest in one form or another. There is even a genetic explanation for this universal. Inbreeding can lead to the spread of harmful recessive traits, so families that inbreed are likely to die out. Genes that promote exogamous behavior have a biological advantage. When combined with the apparent universality of incest prohibitions, we seem to have a pretty good case for moral nativism. The evidence, however, is less secure on close examination. First of all, there is massive cultural variation in which relationships count as incestuous. In some cultures, incest is restricted to the immediate family; in others it includes cousins; in some, only blood relatives are off limits; in others sex with affi nal kin is equally taboo. The case of cousins is especially illustrative. In the contemporary Judeo-Christian West, sex with a fi rst cousin is considered revolting; sex with a second cousin is more permissible, but it still causes some people to snicker or look down their noses. The latter tendency may be a residue of t puma trionfo uk shops he fact that the medieval Church prohibited marriage with cousins up to seven degrees. This was unprecedented. In the ancient world, cousin marriage was commonplace. For example, the Hebrew Bible tells us that Isaac was married to his cousin Rebecca, and Jacob was married to his two cousins, Rachel and Leah. In many contemporary cultures, cousin marriage is strongly encouraged. In one study, it was found that 57% of Pakistani couples were first cousins (Modell & Darr, 2002), and about the same rate of consanguineous marriages can be found in Saudi Arabia (El-Hamzi, Al-Swailem, Warsy, Al-Swailem, & Sula pumas shoes 2011 imani, 1995). There are also cultures that tolerate sexual relations between closer relatives. The Hebrew Bible contains explicit prohibitions against immediate- family incest, but it also tells us that Abraham was married to his half- sister and that Lot’s daughters seduced their father and bore his children. Greco-Roman citizens in Ptolemaic Egypt married their full siblings at very high rates, Thonga hippopotamus hunters used to have sex with their daughters, and the ancient Zoroastrians allegedly encouraged all forms of immediate-family incest (see Prinz, 2007, for review). Hauser et al. (volume 2) have rightfully argued that we should exercise gr Puma canada eat caution in drawing conclusions from exotic cases. In their defense of moral nativism, they warn that rare exceptions cannot be used to refute the hypothesis that a particular rule is innate. I fully agree, and I don’t puma trainers for men want Is Morality Innate? to cheap puma trainers place too much weight on Zoroastrian sexual proclivities. So let me divide my critique of nativism about incest taboos into two parts. The fi rst concerns sex outside the immediate family, such as the prohibition against first-cousin incest. Violations of this rule are not exotic or unusual. Twenty percent of the world’s couples are estimated to be married cousins (Bittles, 1990). There is no reason to think there is an innate taboo against