Róheim maintains that the pattern of a culture correlates more with what might be expected of it from the rearing experiences to which its children are subjected than with the needs of reality. He cites numerous examples, for instance the hoarding of food among the Melanesians of Normanby Island, where food supplies of all sorts are abundant but the children are subjected to repetitive withdrawal of the nipple during suckling. He concludes that the id and the superego, not the ego, play the predominant rôle in culture formation. If this is true then culture is the result of the prolonged importance of infantile characteristics in man, and it is not, as the sociologists maintain, that man's prolonged infancy is necessary to fit him to his culture. In fact the prolonged infancy of man is biological in origin, an example of that slowing down of the rate of development which is a universal principle of evolution.