Screaming Memes

Talk radio recently had a discussion about children misbehaving in restaurants. There were some truly hair-raising incidents related by callers. (One complainer was thrown out of a Starbucks instead of an arrogant mother and her screaming brat.) A long time ago I was on a subway in New York City where a young child was bawling its head off. I was somewhat agitated and, as I looked around the car, a number of others also seemed to be suffering similar angst. This got me to wondering why we humans generally get so uncomfortable when we hear a crying child. I concluded that the probable reason goes way back to human prehistory when a clan's children were its future security. So a crying child could be a threat to a tribe's future. We may be consequently genetically programmed to resolve, as a group, the reason for any child's crying … otherwise we might lose this precious community asset.

So our current discomfort in such situations seems likely to be vestigial of our days in bearskins.