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obvious: clearly, we thrive by working together—in hunting, gathering, child care, and so on—and our social sentiments make this coordination possible.Adam Smith pointed this out long before Darwin: “All the members of human society stand in need of each others assistance, and are likewise exposed to mutual injuries. Where the necessary assistance is reciprocally afforded from love, from gratitude, from friendship, and esteem, the society flourishes and is happy.” And so it is to everyone’s benefit to care about those around us.
    But there is a wrinkle here; for society to flourish in this way, individuals have to refrain from taking advantage of others. A bad actor in a community of good people is the snake in the garden; it’s what the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins calls“subversion from within.” Such a snake would do best of all, reaping the benefits of cooperation without paying the costs. Now, it’s true that the world as a whole would be worse off if the demonic genes proliferated, but this is the problem, not the solution—natural selection is insensitive to considerations about “the world as a whole.” We need to explain what kept demonic genes from taking over the population, leaving us with a world of psychopaths.
    Darwin’s theory was that cooperative traits could prevail if societies containing individuals who worked together peacefully would tend to defeat other societies with less cooperative members—in other words, natural selection operating at the group, rather than individual, level. Writing of a hypothetical conflict between two imaginary tribes, Darwin wrote: “If the one tribe included … courageous, sympathetic and faithful members who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would without doubt succeed best and conquer the other.” An alternative theory, more consistent with individual-level natural selection,is that the good guys might punish the bad guys. That is, even without such conflict between groups, altruism could evolve if individuals were drawn to reward and interact with kind individuals and to punish—or at least shun—cheaters, thieves, thugs, free riders, and the like.
    Other moral universals are harder to explain from an evolutionary perspective. Why are we so obsessed with the morality of sex? Why are we so quick to make moral distinctions on the basis of superficial physical features such as skin color? And how can we explain the emergence of moral notions such as equal rights for all? These are the topics of later chapters.
    W E SHOULD take seriously, then, the idea that we possess an innate and universal morality. But we can’t know if this is true until we study the minds of babies.
    Such research is hard; it is notoriously difficult to knowwhat is going on inside of a baby’s head. When my sons were babies, I would stare at them and wonder what, precisely, stared back. They were like my dog, only more fascinating. (Now they are teenagers, wonderful in many ways, but a lot less professionally interesting—I know what it’s like to be a teenager.) The developmental psychologist John Flavell once said that he would give up all his degrees and honors for justfive minutes inside the head of a two-year-old. I would give up a month of my life for those five minutes—and I’d give up six months for five minutes as an infant.
    Part of the problem is that we don’t remember. The comedian Louis C.K. once compared a baby’s brain to an Etch A Sketch that you shake at the end of every day. Memories don’t stick; even young children don’t remember their babyhood.The psychologist Charles Fernyhough describes asking his three-year-old daughter what it was like to be a baby. Trying to be helpful, she says: “You know what?… When I were a little baby, it was very sunny.”
    Babies are even harder to study than rats and pigeons, which can at least run mazes or peck at levers. When my colleague and