The Goodness Paradox The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution

look up The Goodness Paradox.

I wrote about that when I was discussing Richard Wrangham's book. He's the Harvard evolutionary biologist. He wrote a great book called The Goodness Paradox, which looks at how the ability to kill at scale is uniquely human and how cooperation can lead to mass conflict.

The Goodness Paradox is the title of this book and it refers as a paradox to the fact that humans are so extreme with regard to aggression and non-aggression so we're extremely aggressive in the sense that like chimpanzees we have these demonic tendencies to go off and kill members of neighboring groups using our overwhelming power when we can get a big group attacking a small group and so on in a way that that no other species know the mammals do and in a way that horrifies us in retrospect often it makes us drop our drop drop our jaws at our own behavioral possibilities.

And equally it is very clear that people grow up to be spontaneously thoroughly moral and kind and tolerant with each other we have these two tendencies and you mentioned this division between two types of aggression a proactive and reactive.

And I think you know we actually have a really good story for it now a really good understanding and and it yeah well some of it in the book some of it you outline intense attempts by people within human social groups everywhere to socialize children into controlling their reactive aggression.

And I think that's the residue of a population that would have been 100% like that if you go back 300,000 years ago you know all our babies would have been highly aggressive and would have retained that aggressiveness throughout life.

And I think you pause it that that was a consequence of decreased size of the brain areas associated with reactive emotions that's part of it anyways.