    27

    Is Pitching a Genetically Acquired Skill

    By gambling with its males, a primitive society learns. It is led by

    the men who win--those who seem best adapted to the challenges of

    the moment.  These leaders spread their ideas and their ways of doing

    things--their memes.  The not-so-primitive Alexander the Great

    planted the exalted philosophies of Greece from Persia and Egypt to

    Afghanistan by slaughtering vast hordes of enemy males on the field of

    battle.  Alexander's massacres are fact.  Here's another example from

    the world of speculation.

    Humans are built to eat meat.  The craving for it is wired deeply

    into our system.  There is one hormone--cholecystokinin--designed to

    carry a message from the full stomach to the brain, quieting the

    appetite. The digestive system refuses to send that hormone on its way

    until fats and proteins move from the stomach into the intestines.  In

    other words, your body withholds this hormone to keep you hungry

    until you've swallowed some meat.40  What's more, as anthropologist

    and food expert E.N. Anderson puts it, "We need unusually large

    amounts of protein and cannot synthesize as many of the amino acids

    as some mammals can."41

    If men are like chimps, we started off as herbivores miserable

    about our vegetarian diet. Clumsy male chimpanzees who lumber

    around on all fours occasionally run across a crippled rabbit or a

    wounded baby gazelle.  Do they try to pet and comfort the suffering

    beast?  No.  They smash it with a rock and drag the carcass home for a

    feast.  When the butchers get back to the troop, the entire crew of

    chimpanzee women and children gather in a frenzy, hankering for

    some small morsel of the meat.  Mothers, babies, and even the unlucky

    males who weren't in on the kill turn into sniveling sycophants.  They

    crawl toward the hunters, holding out their hands pathetically,

    begging for all they're worth.  The haughty benefactors at first clutch

    the corpse close to their breasts.  Then they turn magnanimous.  To

    each of those who have humbled themselves, they dole out some small

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