![]() ![]() Still, although the main idea is straightforward enough, much of the text in The Goodness Paradox is rather dense for a general audience. His aim is to translate the technical research into a more accessible form. Sadly, this hasn’t really worked.Īt the outset, Wrangham states that most of the material in his book is so new that it has only been published in scientific papers. Įver since the Enlightenment, as religion gradually fell by the wayside, people have been trying to ground their moral compasses in another prestigious entity - science. Our decisions about which behaviors we like or dislike should never be attributed to our understanding of their evolutionary history or adaptive value. Equally, many morally delightful tendencies did not evolve, such as charity to strangers and kindness to animals. Many tendencies that we regard as morally reprehensible clearly evolved, including numerous kinds of sexual coercion, lethal violence, and social domination. ![]() Whether a behavior evolved because it was directly selected for, or because it was a by-product of another adaptive feature, or indeed, whether it evolved at all, should not color our moral judgments. Glimpsing the behaviours of humans as well as our nearest evolutionary relatives can be disturbing. A male’s ability to intimidate females is a vital component of his strategy for having as many offspring as possible. This stomach-churching practice is part of the reason why, as males become adult, they go through a ritual of beating up on every female. Over subsequent weeks, a female’s most frequent aggressor tends to be her most frequent sex partner, and eventually, even though she is likely to mate several times with every male in her community, he will be the most likely father of her next baby. For each female, one male distinguishes himself from other males by being the one who most frequently attacks her. The male’s aim in such attacks is to intimidate the chosen female into readily acceding to his future demands for sex. One attack at Kanyawara, in western Uganda … lasted for a full eight minutes, during which a male grabbed sticks and beat the female intermittently with them, when he was not slapping, punching and kicking her. ”Ĭhimp males commonly beat up on females, often in surprise attacks. The book highlights a particularly ugly observation from primatologists: “One hundred per cent of wild adult female chimpanzees experience regular serious beatings from males. The eminent Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham explores these findings at length in his fascinating 2019 book The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution. But bonobos are extremely aggressive compared to humans. Male bonobos are about half as aggressive as male chimpanzees, whilst female bonobos are more aggressive than female chimpanzees.īonobos are “ peaceful”, relative to chimps. Many people are familiar with the findings that bonobos are more peaceful than chimpanzees. ![]() And tear overly dominant males to shreds. Thanks to our ancestors and their ability to plan organized murder. We humans are far nicer to members of our own group than chimps are. The fact is, humans are not nearly as violent as our nearest evolutionary relatives.Ĭomparing the level of within-group physical aggression among chimpanzees with human hunter-gatherer communities, chimps are 150 to 550 times more likely than humans to inflict violence against their peers. ![]() The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, Richard Wrangham (Pantheon, $17.00)īut if humans are “self-domesticated ”, then why are there so many violent people among us today? This led us to become relatively peaceful apes. Humans tamed one another by taking out particularly aggressive individuals. Women too were involved in such decisions involving capital punishment, but men typically carried out the killing. If there was a troublemaker, then other less domineering males conspired to organize and commit collective murder against them. Over time, our ancestors eliminated humans - typically males - who were exceedingly aggressive toward members of their own group. The “self-domestication hypothesis” is the idea that in the ancestral environment, early human communities collectively killed individuals prone to certain forms of aggression: arrogance, bullying, random violence, and monopolizing food and sexual partners. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |