Maybe sharing doesn’t have to be taught after all!

The article indicates that there’s new evidence that children are born wanting to help others. The biological logic behind cooperation being preferable to competition is obvious, or at least was obvious to Americans prior to the Reagan years.

While I still fundamentally believe that the purpose of humanity is to overcome human nature, it never hurts to have a naturalistic argument for squelching capitalism. After all, if we imagine prehistoric humans hunting woolly mammoths, it’s easy to see that the person who carted off the whole mammoth to feed themselves alone probably wasted more mammoth than a person who shared it with the group.

In fact, the rest of the group would probably just gang up on the one person, kill him, and take his mammoth. The capitalists were eliminated in the old days.

Somewhere along the line, though, it looks like we become more manipulative in our actions. “As children grow older, they become more selective in their helpfulness. Starting around age 3, they will share more generously with a child who was previously nice to them.” I blame the scourging influence of television. Or, y’know, maybe the golden rule is naturally intuitive as well.

So next time you sell off all your stock in your company and shamelessly move your wealth to the Caymans while your investors suffer, don’t blame human nature. Either you were raised poorly or you’re just an asshole.

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