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544 pages, Hardcover
First published March 26, 2019
“The thing about genes is this: we all have them. And at least 99 percent of the DNA in all humans is exactly the same. A scientific understanding of human beings actually fosters the cause of justice by identifying the deep sources of our common humanity. The underpinnings of society that we have come to understand—the social suite that is our blueprint—have to do with our genetic similarities, not our differences.”
People in crowds often act in thoughtless ways—shouting profanities, destroying property, throwing bricks, threatening others. This can come about partly because of a process known to psychologists as deindividuation: people begin to lose their self-awareness and sense of individual agency as they identify more strongly with the group, which often leads to antisocial behaviors they would never consider if they were acting alone. They can form a mob, cease to think for themselves, lose their moral compass, and adopt a classic us-versus-them stance that brooks no shared understanding.
Crowds are especially feared by those in power when they emerge organically, without explicit organization, as they frequently do.
Children’s behavior often involves innately making a kind of miniature and temporary society. From an early age, humans cannot help themselves.
They believed it required as much bravery to approach the end of an age as to start it.
Historian Steven Mintz noted in Huck’s Raft, his sweeping work on American childhood, that almost every innovation in child welfare in the United States, including orphanages and subsidized child care, has been driven primarily by adult concerns. Of secondary importance were philosophical and pragmatic convictions about what was best for children.
One of the more intriguing consequences of collective child-rearing, however, was the virtual absence of marriage between peers. The longer individuals resided together on a kibbutz as children, the greater their aversion to sexual contact with one another. These findings support the so-called Westermarck effect, a psychological hypothesis proposed in 1891 by the Finnish anthropologist Edvard Westermarck. He suggested that childhood co-residence served as a kinship cue (people decide who their siblings are based on who they grew up with).
Effective leaders have to help minimize group conflict, deal with troublesome individuals before they compromise group harmony, keep work on schedule, make rational decisions in emergencies, deal fairly with conflict, and facilitate communication.
Balancing group identity and individuality is key for successful social systems.
the tendency to cooperate is a property not only of individuals but also of groups. Cooperation depends on the rules governing the formation of friendship ties. Good people can do bad things (and vice versa) simply as a result of the structure of the network in which they are embedded, regardless of the convictions they hold or that the group espouses. It is not just a matter of being connected to “bad” people; the number and pattern of social connections is also crucial.
Third, these examples—especially those far outside the region of the morphospace human societies actually occupy—can highlight how similar our societies are and how small a part of the range our species actually occupies. With ant colonies as an alternative, all human societies look extremely familiar.
across many cultures throughout Amazonia, and in a few scattered elsewhere, children are believed to have multiple fathers.
In one sample of two hundred and twenty-seven Aché children followed over ten years, 70 percent of those with one father survived to age ten, but 85 percent of those with two or more fathers did.
We can see that many cultural practices might, from some points of view, enhance survival in difficult circumstances. Our ability to be cultural animals (with whatever beliefs, practices, or technology) and engage in teaching and social learning is an important part of the social suite.
When scientists say that there is a gene or genes “for” a trait, it means that variations in a genotype correspond to variations in a phenotype, not necessarily that a specific gene is solely responsible for a specific phenotype.
There is rarely a one-to-one relationship between genotype and phenotype. Instead, genes yield particular behaviors more than others on average—just like smoking cigarettes substantially increases your chance of getting lung cancer on average but does not make it a certainty.
The environment in which genes find themselves is not always the same either. Although genetic information is basically unchanging throughout an individual’s lifetime, human physical and sociocultural environments are quite variable. As a consequence, genes can have very different effects on individuals depending on the context.
the more social connections someone has, the higher one’s tolerance for pain—and even a connection to animals will do.
The presence of pets encourages human interactions and possibly even increases empathy.
It seems to me that people’s squeamishness about animal friendship reflects a certain degree of arrogance.
It is true that we appear to be the only species that says “good-bye” and that other species seem to lack any special leave-taking rituals.69 But we are not the only species that says “hello” and that has specific greeting behaviors. Indeed, anticipation of the future is not absolutely necessary for the formation and maintenance of friendship ties. Only the cognitive ability to remember the past is needed. Even if the ability of other animals to anticipate the future is unclear, there is no doubt that many species have memory and even a sense of time.
Many birds recognize their nest sites rather than their offspring, as sneaky ornithologists moving eggs and chicks around have discovered.
Among humans, mutual exposure during childhood similarly weakens the sexual attraction between individuals when they are adults (as we saw with the kibbutzim). Conversely, there is some evidence that biologically related people reared apart sometimes report an overwhelming (and usually terribly unwelcome) physical attraction when they meet as adults.
Feeling close to someone involves some inclusion of the other in one’s self-identification.
Spending time with a friend or writing personal notes are good examples, because they are not scalable and are hard to fake.
Scalability is an important factor: maybe explains why social media happy birthdays do not feel genuine
The fact that you are irreplaceable to your friends even though you are unremarkable to strangers suggests that there is a deep connection between individuality—another key part of the social suite—and friendship.
Referring to someone as “irreplaceable” is a common form of praise. And many psychological phenomena in our species reflect the threatening nature of social replaceability, including the fact that we seem to like to form groups that are small enough for individuality to be appreciated. Ironically, then, individuality is crucial to the formation of social groups and to how the whole emerges from the parts.
when people are left to choose friends among a group of people to whom they are not actually related, they have a discernible, if slight, preference for people who resemble them genetically.
Just as friends tended to reciprocate friendship, enemies tended to reciprocate animosity, but the rates of reciprocation were quite different: 34 percent and 5 percent, respectively. That is, if you named someone as a friend, it was likely that person had also named you as a friend, but if you named someone as an enemy, it was less likely that individual had also named you as an enemy. This difference highlights the fact that people have secret enemies more often than they have secret friends. People declare their friendships to each other but are less likely to state that they are enemies.
We also found that the more friends a person had, the more enemies he or she was likely to have, with each ten extra friends being associated with one extra enemy.
Group identity, like sustained friendships, provides a solution to the risks of unreciprocated cooperation.
Prejudicial treatment of out-groups starts when people are very young and it does not seem to vary much with age, which suggests that the capacity for intergroup cognition is innate.
Many of the vilest expressions of racism and prejudice are likely extreme forms of out-group hatred, not of in-group affection.
the more identities available for individuals to assume and the more cross-cutting they are (such that people who are discordant on religion might be members of the same political party, for instance), the more tolerant a society can be of outsiders and, hence, of everyone.
Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss observed that binary opposition (male/female, good/evil, hot/cold, conservative/liberal, human/animal, body/soul, nature/nurture, and so forth) is one of the simplest and most widespread ways that humans come to terms with complexities in the natural world.
The independent evolution of eyes has occurred at least fifty times across different species—as if seeing the light is inevitable.
You might take it for granted that you can differentiate yourself from others and tell others apart, but the ability to have an individual identity and recognize the identity of other individuals (especially beyond one’s mate or offspring) is uncommon in the animal world.
There is much evidence that grief is physiologically harmful and can even increase one’s subsequent risk of death,
Some theorize that grief motivates people to connect with others in order to reduce the pain. In this account, grief is adaptive because it keeps humans, a social species, from being alone
some hypothesize that the anticipation of grief might compel people to work harder to keep loved ones alive, which would be advantageous.
another theory views grief as a signal from those who are suffering, a sort of plea for help.
It is difficult to maintain cooperation as group size increases.77 Each person becomes individually less important for cooperation.
evolution tends to favor free-riders more in larger groups.
This willingness to pay a personal cost to punish someone else who is hurting a third person is known as altruistic punishment.
culture is a set of beliefs, behaviors, and artifacts that can be arbitrary or adaptive, that are shared by members of a group and are typical of it, and that are socially transmitted.
Though most of the cultural traditions we see in animals are practical ways to enhance survival—new methods to gather food, for example—some new cultural traditions seem arbitrary. A group of chimps at Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust, a sanctuary in Zambia where the chimpanzees live in forested enclosures, developed a useless practice of putting a long blade of grass into one ear, like an earring (see figure 9.6). This appeared to serve no practical purpose and was thus akin to a fad in humans.
While as much as a third of humans during the Paleolithic period died from intentional violence, only about one out of a thousand people in even our most violent communities die from it today.
Status can be defined as the relative ability to gain or control valuable or contested resources within a group.
Social learning is especially adaptive when a species faces an environment that is changing so frequently that genetic evolution—in which individual mutations lead to small differences in form and function—cannot do its job quickly enough.
Humans are unusual among mammals in having the capacity to be marathon runners. Though we cannot outrun even our household pets in a short sprint, we have all sorts of adaptations that equip us to run for a long time (these include slow-twitch muscle fibers, which are useful for endurance, and the ability to regulate body temperature during long periods of exertion).
Worldwide, the ability to digest milk in adulthood is uncommon and is generally absent in East Asia and Africa. Overall, perhaps 65 percent of the world’s population (including a significant fraction of North Americans and Europeans) lose their lactase enzymes by adulthood.
Positivism asserts that truth can be known only via scientific study involving the application of logic and mathematics to the natural world in a manner that is verifiable and reproducible.
Reductionism assumes that the whole is merely the sum of its parts and nothing more.
Essentialism is the position that things in the material world (including people and society) have a fundamental set of properties that are necessary for their identity.
determinism is the position that the state of any system is completely fixed by its preceding state or states.
at least 99 percent of the DNA in all humans is exactly the same.
In 1900, 41 percent of the workforce was employed in agriculture; in 2000, only 1.9 percent was.