New Age people think that humans are more evolved than the lower mammals because (aside from the fact that we can afford better interior decorators) we're more affectionate, more emotionally "available". Actually, cuddles were invented by trilobites when they clustered together to avoid predators half a billion years ago. These days, penguins do this until one falls off the ice sheet and gets eaten by a sea lion. Once the lions are sated, all the birds tumble in and start hunting for their own food. Is human affection really any more noble than this? Can it betray us if we don't understand its moral blind spots?

For most mammals, one or two parents help you get a head start, after which you're on your own. With humans, our attachment to parents would usually forge a lifelong emotional bond. Trust and loyalty were crucial elements of this social contract. You could always call on them, and they could always call on you.

As these family circles widened, we needed a way to find unity within a growing tribe of friends. I believe our new story-telling and story-believing abilities were crucial tools in this project. We invented all-powerful parents in the sky that united us into one family. The details of this narrative mattered no more than the tartan pattern on your Scottish kilt. The point was that, unless we had been bad, our sky-parents would protect us and our family, and now our friends and neighbors too. Imagination and suspension of disbelief became part of our basic social arsenal. When we started to migrate we began to run into other tribes. If they had the same sky-parents, we could trust them. If they didn't, they needed to be rubbed out like the dying embers of our last cooking fire.

The Iriqois of New York, whom Benjamin Franklin consulted when designing the United States, improved on this magic. They not only had tribes, but also clans. Everyone had two badges they could flash to win automatic acceptance, thus increasing the likelihood that conflict could be avoided. If either your tribe or your clan matched that of a stranger, you were brothers.

These are just examples, like murder, of how something once crucial for individual survival slowly becomes a threat to species survival. Individuals carry in themselves obsolete defenses beaten into them by inadequate parents created by inadequate cultures. Civilization itself is still marred by obsolete defenses we cling to because we still haven't really figured out what civilization is and how best to promote its development. And men are dying even today merely because they have the wrong sky-parents.