Análisis funcional de los genes expresados diferencialmente (MapMan)

At first glance this explains why human beings are such enthusiastic collaborators.

Yet

it is not entirely a satisfactory explanation, for reasons outlined by a brilliant Israeli scientist Y\'ith a habit of putting cats among intellectual pigeons, Amotz Zahavi. He studies Arabian babblers, which, like many medium-sized birds in warm parts of the world, live not in pairs but in larger family groups in which the

uS T H E 0 R I G I N S 0 F V I R T U E

'teenagers' help the parent$ rear more young. Such help ng at the nest has never seemed to present much of a problem for biologists to explain. After all, merely by hanging around, · the teenagers increase their chance to inherit the breeding role, meanwhi bringing brothers and sisters into the world. It is a system driven b nepotism and selfishness.

But Zahavi was puzzled by the enthusiasm of the teen gers. Not only do they compete vigorously to bring food to the ne t, to take on the role of sentinels watching for predators and to efend the territory against intruding neighbours, but their enthusi sm seems to be strangely unwelcome. Dominant birds actually try 0 prevent subordinates from helping, whereas they should, Zaha . thought, free-load upon their younger siblings' efforts.

Zahavi argues that the helpers are not pursuing ne otistic or inherited rewards at all, but are after something he calls s cial pres­

tige. Vigorous and energetic helping, he says, emphasizes t e commit­

ment of the bird to the family, which in turn dra s similar commitment from the other partners. This leads Zahavi to a reassess­

ment of marriage - at least in birds. 'I suggest that, even i collabor­

ations of two, a large part of the investment can be expl ined as an advertisement of the quality of the investor and of its m ivation to continue collaborating, in order to decrease the partner' tendency to cheat or desert.' Zahavi's conclusion depicts gene

weapon.

'4

Human cultures echo this strange ambiguity. At any

Britain, about seven to eight per cent of the economy is evoted to producing articles that will be given away as gifts. In J apa the figure is probably higher. It is a largely recession-proof indust as proved by the eagerness with which manufacturers of r�fri ators and cookers diversified in recent decades into goods such s toasters and coffee-makers, items whose sales are dominated by t e wedding and Christmas markets. They explicitly did so as a he ge aga:inst recessions. But why do people give each other gifts? It s partly to be nice to them, partly also to protect their own rep tations as generous people, and partly too to put the recipient unde an obliga­

tion to reciprocate. Gifts can easily become bribes.

P U B L I C G O O D S A N D P R I V A T E G I F T S

Il9

Take the habit of

kula,

as practised in the T robriand Islands.

Kula

is the exchange of shell necklaces for armbands. The islands form a circular archipelago, and people give necklaces to those on islands clockwise from them, and armbands in exchange to those on islands anticlockwise. The two kinds of

kula

goods travel in an endless circle, utterly pointless but inexpressibly important. Why is gift giving such an obsession of man?

In the 192.0S, the French ethnographer Marcel Mauss wrote his famous

'Essai sur

Ie

don',

in which he suggested that gift giving in pre-industrial societies was a way of making social contracts with strangers. In the absence of the state to secure peace, gift giving served the same purpose. In the 19605 Marshall Sahlins noticed a rather obvious feature of societies all around the world. The closer the kinship between the person giving the gift and the person receiv­

ing it, the less necessary it was that the gift

be

balanced by a commen­

surate gift in return. Within the family, said Sahlins, there was 'generalized reciprocity', by which he meant no reciprocity at all:

people just gave each other gifts without keeping a count of who owed whom. Within the village or the tribe, it was necessary to be fairly exact in balancing a gift. Between tribes there was what Sahlins termed negative reciprocity, his rather confusing term for thc;ft, or for an attempt to get something for less than what it is worth.

Only with unrelated allies was true reciprocity value for value -practised.

Of course a parent does not expect reciprocal generosity from a child, and of course a thief is not expecting to pay for his loot, but in every other case, a gift is very clearly intended to be reciprocated in rough proportion. The recipient is embarrassed not to have some­

thing to give in return, or is annoyed at the thought that you might feel a small box of chocolates to be sufficient payment for all the help they have given you in some way. Even if the twO payments are in entirely different currencies, the point of giving is to exchange.

About the only exception, it seems to me, is sending flowers to a friend in hospital, and even there you expect him to send you flowers when you are in hospital.

The instinct is immediately

f

amiliar. Try to imagine a world

12.0

T H E O I U G I N S O F V I R T U E

without it; a world in which people did not mind how g�erous you were, nor did you mind how grateful they were. From !deep down inside you comes this irrepressible tendency to see the ",orId of gift giving in terms of deals (except among relatives).

As so often, this is easier to notice in cultures other th�n our own.

When Columbus first stepped ashore in America, he met people who were separated by many tens of thousands of years from,all cultural Contact with the ancestors of Europeans. These twO lineages had had no opportunity to transmit practices to each othqr since the Mesolithic. Yet there was no difficulty in understandiqg that gifts were given in the expectation of being reciprocated. It :was one of the things that the red and white men fdl instantly to doing. The term 'Indian gift' came to mean, in colonial America, a present for which an equivalent return is expected� Gifts came with strings attached - that was the whole point of gifts. To this day, it is one of the least incomprehensible cultural universals. When bne anthro­

pologist worked with a Kenyan tribe, he was struck

b/y

how they belittled everything he gave them. 'Every gift horse was examined carefully in the mouth and found wanting,' he said. But he had no difficulty understanding why. Gifts are given with an ' dement of calculation, and his recipients knew this as well as he did. There'is no such thing as a free lunch. Even in the most sophisticated Euro­

pean circles, you fed the obligation that comes insepanably with a

rich present from somebody,'S '

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