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great-grandchildren.And as we noted before, those descendants themselves continue to live rich and successful, if occasionally risky, lives.
    THE ULTIMATE QUESTION
    So, are people rational or irrational?If we look only at the surface, many of our choices appear rather foolish.Most of us would choose to be the person in the movie-ticket line who lucked into $100 instead of the one who won $150 but didn’t win $1,000.It’s not economically rational to say, “No thanks.I prefer not to have an extra free fifty bucks.”The many superficially worrisome tendencies of the human mind lead some of us to seriously doubt whether people are rational Econs and to consider instead that they are all dim-witted morons.
    Well, we beg to differ.Rather than Econs or morons, we are rational animals.Yes, decision making is biased, and yes, individual decisions are sometimes rather moronic.But underneath all those biases and misjudgments is an exceptionally wise ancestral system of decision making.To understand how people make decisions, we must first ask why the brain evolved to make the particular choices that it does.By connecting the story of human behavior with that of the rest of the animal kingdom, we come to see that our brains are designed to make choices in ways that enhanced our ancestors’ fitness.
    B UT THERE’S a twist in the plot!Just because evolutionary forces guide our behavior does not mean that you or I or Joe Kennedy’s newest great-grandson is driven to achieve just one single evolutionary goal of “maximizing fitness.”Just as it is too simple to say that people seek utility, it is too simple to say that people seek fitness.Instead, as we discuss next, human decision making is designed to achieve a set of very different evolutionary goals.In investigating how people meet these evolutionary goals, scientists have discovered somethingimportant: solutions to these different problems often require us to make decisions in different—and sometimes completely incompatible—ways.We are, in fact, inconsistent by design.To see why this has profound implications for your decisions, let’s make a stop in Alabama and take a look at several puzzling decisions made by Martin Luther King Jr.

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The Seven Subselves
    O N S EPTEMBER 28, 1962, Martin Luther King Jr.was sitting peacefully on a convention stage in Birmingham, Alabama, when a man in the audience casually walked onstage and approached him.Suddenly, the man began punching Dr.King in the face.King was knocked over by the first blow, but even as the civil rights leader fell, his attacker continued throwing a brutal barrage of punches.Although King had been advocating nonviolent protests against racial discrimination, no one would have blamed him if he had gotten violently angry at his assailant, a white supremacist later revealed to be on a mission from the American Nazi Party.Instead, King chose a different course of action.He stood back up, gazed into his attacker’s face with a look of transcendent calm, and dropped his arms defenselessly, “like a newborn baby,” according to one observer.As others jumped to his defense, King pleaded with them, “Don’t touch him.Don’t touch him.We have to pray for him.”
    This incident is one of many that demonstrated King’s commitment to moral principles.Ordained as a Baptist minister, Reverend King devoted himself to embodying and promoting the ideals of decency, integrity, and virtue.His commitment to nonviolence was steadfast and consistent, extending well beyond issues of civil rights for African Americans.He spoke out against the war in Vietnam, for example, even though it cost him the support of powerful allies such asPresident Lyndon Johnson.On other occasions, his commitment to nonviolent protests against civil rights landed him in jail.
    Yet Dr.King’s unwavering commitment to moral principles did not extend to the realm of extramarital affairs.King’s friend and fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy admitted