"The Goodness Paradox"

It's still good weather for staying home and reading here in Michigan.

However, we did manage to take a walk in the half-frozen, foggy woods.

What I've been reading.

Richard Wrangham is a very provocative author. Ten years ago, his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human was controversial, but over time, its premise seems to have been fully accepted and absorbed into the general view of how humans evolved (my review here). Wrangham's new book, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, was published last month. In it he explores another question about human evolution: how do groups of humans live so peacefully together but engage in various types of group violence? How do you account for the "great oddity about humanity ... our moral range, from unspeakable viciousness to heartbreaking generosity"? (p. 4)

Although aggression occurs among humans in all modern situations, and even in the few well-documented primitive bands of hunter-gatherers, the impact of conflict between humans in these circumstances is minimal compared to acts of violence in the wild among our closest primate relatives: chimpanzees. However, in contrast to human calm in day-to-day living situations, Wrangham points out, we are belligerent when it comes to group-on-group action; war, in particular, is a very human activity. He questions how we evolved the individual tendency to virtue with the group tendency towards violence.

Wrangham distinguishes between two types of aggression: reactive aggression (response to a threat) and proactive aggression (cooly planned acts of violence). He explores a huge body of knowledge in anthropology, primatology (his original field), evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and other natural history to formulate a detailed description of these contrasting forms of action. He explains what happens in the human brain, what happens between individuals, and what happens in groups.

Chimps, our closest relatives, are very different from us when it comes to reactive aggression -- they are highly violent to one another and often kill other chips in their own and other troops. One observation Wrangham quotes is from a primatologist who pointed out that if you subjected a troop of chips to the crowding that one experiences in an airplane, they would resort to extreme violence against each other; however, someone countered, before the humans get on the plane, they have to be searched for bombs. Though humans are able to inhibit their violent impulses at being crowded together, they have an ability to plan and coordinate attacks for more-or-less abstract motives -- which chimps are completely incapable of.

Humans evolved their suppression of reactive aggression in order to live in highly cooperative and calm situations. Wrangham makes the case that this evolution took place through a process called self-domestication, which has many consequences beyond suppressing our reactive aggression. Like the animals we live with (especially dogs, the domesticated descendants of wolves), we have tamed ourselves to create a calmer domestic life for ourselves. He also describes one comparable result of self-domestication of the bonobos, which are very similar to chimps but are comparatively non-violent in their collective lives. The descriptions of these two species -- which are quite closely related to one another and to us -- and his explanation of how they evolved is fascinating.

Our human and pre-human ancestors, Wragham explains, domesticated themselves by a long process beginning 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. This was possible for a number of reasons, especially the human ability to use language for group planning and action when needed to eliminate group members who were a threat to the peaceful lives of others. As rogue group members were eliminated (a hypothesis he supports through many diverse types of evidence), the survivors became more and more domesticated, resulting in the way humans live now. Wrangham not only describes the evolutionary process, he also explores many of its ramifications for our modern lives.

I've given only the barest outline of this challenging book, and maybe I haven't done such a good job. If you find my summary hard to believe, I urge you to read it for yourself and see the evidence.