The goodness paradox The strange relationship between virtue and violence in human evolution

Review by Choice Review

How can we account for our own species' unique blend of opposite moral dispositions? How can we reconcile, at the individual and group levels, our self-domesticated "goodness," which makes us go out of our ways to help strangers and establish welfare systems for the dispossessed, and our capacity for exceptional acts of violence, such as torture and genocide? Wrangham's original theory holds that these seemingly contradictory tendencies in human behavior originate from two independently evolved types of aggression: a low reactive one and a high proactive one, respectively. His proposed explanation is supported by scientifically informed findings from a range of relevant disciplines, including biological and cultural anthropology, evolutionary psychology, behavioral ecology, genetics, neuroscience, and sociology. His powerful, thought-provoking argumentation highlights the significance of primate social behavior to further our understanding of the proximate and ultimate causes of our cooperative/altruistic and aggressive/antisocial behaviors. This ambivalence is reflected in the clear and elegant writing style of this brilliant book, whose first and last words are "Adolf Hitler" and "wisdom." This theory sheds an evolutionary light on the biological, psychological, moral, and sociocultural mechanisms of human civilizations. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --Jean-Baptiste Leca, University of Lethbridge

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Wrangham (Catching Fire), a biological anthropologist at Harvard, undertakes a thorough and persuasive examination of this paradoxical observation: "we can be the nastiest of species and also the nicest." He notes that "compared with other primates, we practice exceptionally low levels of violence in our day-to-day lives, yet we achieve exceptionally high rates of death from violence in our wars." Wrangham argues that there are two types of aggression, reactive and proactive. The former reacts to an immediate threat while the latter connotes "violence that is coolly planned." Wrangham builds the case that human evolution has selected against reactive aggression, in turn causing a self-domestication process akin to how humans tamed many animal species. Its key component was the human ability to form coalitions and thus impose sanctions, including capital punishment, on the overly aggressive. While "cooperation was a key to Homo sapiens's domination of the earth," it also gave humans "war, caste, the butchery of helpless adults, and many other forms of irresistible coercion." Wrangham does not, however, propose that readers passively accept sanctioned violence as a necessary aspect of modern-day societies, concluding his well-argued treatise by rejecting the continued use of capital punishment and asserting that the "important human quest... is reducing our capacity for organized violence." (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Review by Library Journal Review

People, like animals, have adapted to survive over time. Wrangham (anthropology, Harvard Univ.; Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human) examines matters such as domestication, cooperation in groups, and how managing different types of aggression has shaped how species thrive. Wrangham has clearly done his research. In addition to citing both past and current scientific and field studies, he notes various thinkers and writers, such as Jean-Jacques ­Rousseau, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, and Rudyard Kipling. The hefty back matter comprises more than 60 pages of bibliography and notes, with topics covered ranging from biology and war to capital punishment. Various species are examined in depth, especially chimpanzees and other primates, sometimes more so than humans, which makes the subtitle somewhat misleading. The author aims to provide a work accessible to those outside the scientific field, offering a great deal of information. However, some readers might struggle with the dense, scholarly writing style. VERDICT For ­academic-minded readers.-Elissa Cooper, Helen Plum Memorial Lib., Lombard, IL © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

"If we evolved to be so good, why are we also so vile?" Wrangham (Biological Anthropology/Harvard Univ.; Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, 2009, etc.) looks at the noblerand ignoblercharacteristics of our kind.The fact that we have societiesand such things as schools, medicine, music, and the likeis evidence, by the author's account, that humans have evolved a vast capacity to collaborate and cooperate, with attributes including "tolerance, trust, and understanding." So it has been since the Pleistocene, he adds, though of course humans have also evolved in ways that allow us to band together to perform unspeakable acts of violence and cruelty. Wrangham closely examines the social behavior of chimpanzees, who are far more disposed to violence than humans, as well as the ways of bonobos and other simians. "The human rate of physical aggression," he writes, "within social communities isstrikingly low." He also looks into the neurobiology of violence, implicating the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and other brain structures, and at the biological and cultural implications of "self-domestication," a process by which humans school themselves out of their feral nature and into habits of being that moderate violencethough, as he adds, while other domesticated species such as dogs and guinea pigs are "delightfully tractable," human adaptability and cultural learning add up to something more. Yet, he notes, both intelligence and adaptability contribute to our inclination toward "coalitionary proactive aggression," which enables us to plan acts of violence against victims who cannot fight back. The resultant outbursts of war and other violence are expressions of the human penchant for "vying for power," but that contest doesn't preclude cooperative behavior: "To avert episodes of violence," concludes the author, "we should constantly remind ourselves of how easily a complex social organization can decay, and how hard it is to construct."Wrangham's book adds materially to a conversation that includes Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, Matthieu Ricard's Altruism, and other recent texts on human behavior. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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PREFACE   At the start of my career, I would have been surprised to learn that fifty years later I would be publishing a book about humans. In the 1970s I was privileged to be a graduate student working in Jane Goodall's research project on chimpanzees in Tanzania. Spending whole days trailing individual apes in a natural habitat was a joy. All that I wanted to do was study animal behavior, and in 1987 I launched my own study of wild chimpanzees in Uganda's Kibale National Park.   My bucolic research was disturbed, however, by discoveries that were too intriguing to ignore. Chimpanzees exhibited occasional episodes of exceptional violence. To shed an evolutionary light on this behavior, I compared chimpanzees with their sister species, bonobos. In the 1990s, research on bonobos was beginning in earnest. Chimpanzees and bonobos were proving to be an extraordinary duo, bonobos being much more peaceful than the relatively aggressive chimpanzees. In various collaborations that I describe in this book, but most particularly with Brian Hare and Victoria Wobber, my colleagues and I concluded that bonobos had diverged from a chimpanzee-like ancestor by a process that was strongly akin to domestication. We called the process "self-domestication." And since human behavior has often been considered similar to the behavior of domesticated animals, the insights from bonobos suggested lessons for human evolution. The key fact about humans is that within our social communities we have a low propensity to fight: compared to most wild mammals we are very tolerant.   I was acutely aware, however, that, even if humans are in some ways notably unreactive, in other ways we are a very aggressive species. In 1996, in a book called Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Dale Peterson and I described evolutionary explanations for similarities in aggression between chimpanzees and humans. The perva­siveness of violence in human society is inescapable, and the evolution­ary theories explaining it seem sound. So how could our domesticated qualities and our capacity for terrible violence be reconciled? For the next twenty years or so, I grappled with this question.   The resolution that I describe in the following pages is that our social tolerance and our aggressiveness are not the opposites that at first they appear to be, because the two behaviors involve different types of aggression. Our social tolerance comes from our having a relatively low tendency for reactive aggression, whereas the violence that makes humans deadly is proactive aggression. The story of how our species came to combine these different tendencies--low reactive aggression and high proactive aggression--has not been told before. It takes us into many corners of anthropology, biology, and psychology, and will undoubtedly continue to be developed. But I believe that it already offers a rich and fresh perspective on the evolution of our behavioral and moral tendencies, as well as on the fascinating question of how and why our species, Homo sapiens, came into existence at all.   Much of the material in this book is so new that it has been published only in scientific papers. My goal here is to make this richly technical literature and its far-reaching implications more accessible. I approach the topic through the eyes of a chimpanzee-watcher who has walked, watched, and listened in many habitats of East and Central Africa. Those of us privileged to have spent days alone with apes have felt touched by Pleistocene breezes. The romance of the past, the story of our ancestors, is a thrill, and innumerable mysteries remain for future generations seeking the origins of the modern mind in deep time. Enlarged understanding of our prehistory and of who we are will not be the only reward. Dreams inspired by the African air can yet generate a stronger and more secure view of ourselves, if we open our minds to worlds beyond those that we know well. Excerpted from The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Peace and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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