This shared way of thinking, feeling, and living makes us look like a single tribe, which the anthropologist Donald Brown has called the Universal People, after Chomsky’s Universal Grammar.63 Hundreds of traits, from fear of snakes to logical operators, from romantic love to humorous insults, from poetry to food taboos, from exchange of goods to mourning the dead, can be found in every society ever documented. It’s not that every universal behavior directly reflects a universal component of human nature—many arise from an interplay between universal properties of the mind, universal properties
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