Why the Brain Takes So Much Time and Effort

The brain’s chief job description—yours, mine, and your hopelessly adorable children’s—is to help our bodies survive another day. The reason for survival is as old as Darwin and as young as sexting: so we can project our genes into the next generation. Will a human willingly overcome self-interest to ensure the survival of his or her family’s genes into the next generation? Apparently, yes. Enough of us did hundreds of thousands of years ago that we grew up to take over the Seren...

 The Train of Thought to Equality

Since then society has evolved a sequence of ci central con¬ cepts each of which was at one time thought to make it work of itself, and each of which has had to be corrected to the next. There was the early eighteenth-century concept of selfinterest, in Mandeville and others; then came enlightened self-interest; then the greatest happiness of the greatest num¬ bet; utility; the labor theory of valueie; and thence its expression either in the welfare state or in the clasassless society. Men ...