Bonobos, on the other hand, look very much like a chimpanzee, but behave extraordinarily differently. When Wrangham and his colleagues started researching the bonobo, they realized their bodies differ from chimpanzees in "a very strikingly similar way to the ways that bodies of domesticated animals differ from those of wild animals. The process of domestication is essentially a loss of aggressiveness and fear, but it's generally accompanied by physical changes.
Through that process, the bonobos' "faces became shorter, their teeth become smaller, and there is a reduction in the degree of difference between males and females.
Wrangham said that a few years ago, it was observed that humans evolved to be — in some ways — anatomically like domesticated animals. This suggests to Wrangham that starting around , years, our ancestors lost their historical aggressiveness and started becoming calmer and kinder under ordinary circumstances.
For an indication of how humans became "self-domesticated," Wrangham said we look at small-scale societies where there's no state intervention. If a man becomes exceptionally aggressive and tries to use his physical dominance to persist with aggressive and violent behaviours, people in small scale societies will take matters into their own hands.
They agree and they kill him," said Wrangham. The technological and cultural marvels that distinguish our species are made possible by these qualities, in combination with our intelligence.
Hearts can be withdrawn from human breasts, dead hearts, and, after a little neat manipulation, popped back again as good as new. The skies can be conquered. Sputniks can whizz round and round the globe and be controlled and guided. Heart surgery, space travel, and comic opera all depend on advances that would have amazed our distant ancestors. More important from an evolutionary point of view, however, they also depend on capacities for a quite exceptional ability to work together, including tolerance, trust, and understanding.
In short, a great oddity about humanity is our moral range, from unspeakable viciousness to heartbreaking generosity. From a biological perspective, such diversity presents an unsolved problem. If we evolved to be good, why are we also so vile? Or if we evolved to be wicked, how come we can also be so benign? The combination of human good and evil is not a product of modernity.
To judge from the behavior of recent hunter-gatherers and the records of archaeology, for hundreds of thousands of years people have shared food, divided their labor, and helped the needy.
Our Pleistocene ancestors were in many ways thoroughly tolerant and peaceful. Yet the same sources of evidence also indicate that our forebears practiced raiding, sexual dominance, torture, and executions with varieties of cruelty that were as abominable as any Nazi practice. Certainly nowadays, a capacity for great cruelty and violence is not particular to any one group. For a variety of reasons, a given society might have experienced exceptional peace for decades even as another might have suffered spasms of exceptional violence.
But this does not suggest any differences in the innate psychology of people throughout time and world over. Everywhere humans seem to have had the same propensity for both virtue and violence. Babies show a similar contradiction in their tendencies. Before infants can talk, they will smile and chuckle and sometimes help a friendly adult in need, an extraordinary demonstration of our innate predisposition to trust one another.
At other times, however, those same bighearted offspring will scream and rage with sublime self-centeredness to get their way. There are two classic explanations for this paradoxical combination of selflessness and selfishness. Both assume that our social behavior is hugely determined by our biology. Both also agree that only one of our two notable tendencies is the product of genetic evolution.
They differ, however, in which side of our personality each regards as fundamental—our docility, or our aggressiveness. One explanation posits that tolerance and docility are innate to humanity. According to this view, although we are essentially good, our corruptibility stands in the way of our living in perpetual peace. The paradox of human nature Sean Illing You start the book with a paradox of sorts: Humans are both exceptionally violent and exceptionally kind.
Robert Sapolsky In an evolutionary sense, we're this incredibly confused species, in between all sorts of extremes of behavior and patterns of selection compared to other primates who are far more consistently X or Y, and we're so often floating in between. Sean Illing Can you clarify what you mean by context here?
Robert Sapolsky Sure. Sean Illing You argue that biological factors don't so much cause behavior as modulate it — can you explain what you mean? Robert Sapolsky Ultimately, there is no debate. Sean Illing Given how variable human behavior is, do you believe in a fixed human nature?
Robert Sapolsky Human nature is extraordinarily malleable, and I think that's the most defining thing about our nature. Free will is an illusion Sean Illing Okay, but in the book you come awfully close to concluding something very different. Robert Sapolsky If it seemed tentative, it was just because I was trying to be polite to the reader or to a certain subset of readers.
Sean Illing If we're just marionettes on a string and we don't have the kind of agency that we think we have, then what sense does it make to reward or punish behavior? Sean Illing So what is true for the epileptic is true for all of us all of the time? Robert Sapolsky The easiest answer is that we're really violent. Sean Illing What is the wrong kind of violence? What is the right kind of violence? Robert Sapolsky Of course that tends to be in the eye of the beholder.
Sean Illing Violence is a fact of nature — all species engage in it one way or other. Robert Sapolsky That does seem pretty much the case. I believe it is really only humans that do violence for purely ritualistic purposes.
Author Robert Sapolsky. Thompson-McLellan Photography Humans are tribal animals Sean Illing Is our tribal past the most important thing to understand about human behavior? Robert Sapolsky I think it's an incredibly important one, and what's most important about it is to understand the implications of the fact that all of us have multiple tribal affiliations that we carry in our heads and to understand the circumstances that bring one of those affiliations to the forefront over another.
Sean Illing You spend a lot of time talking about the role of symbols and ideas in human life. Reasons for optimism Sean Illing Has civilization made us better? Robert Sapolsky Absolutely.
Sean Illing You say you incline to pessimism but that this book gave you reasons to be optimistic. Robert Sapolsky Because there's very little about our behaviors that are inevitable, including our worst behaviors.
Next Up In Conversations. Delivered Fridays. Thanks for signing up! Even if the bugs had names, and you could hear their shells painfully crunching? And would you take a perverse pleasure from blasting an innocent bystander with an excruciating noise?
Essentially, he wants to answer a question we all may have asked: why do some people take pleasure in cruelty? Not just psychopaths and murderers — but school bullies, internet trolls and even apparently upstanding members of society such as politicians and policemen.
It is easy, he says, to make quick and simplistic assumptions about these people. Then, a little more than a decade ago, his grad student Kevin Williams suggested that they explore whether these self-absorbed tendencies are linked to two other unpleasant characteristics — Machiavellianism the coolly manipulative and psychopathy callous insensitivity and immunity to the feelings of others. It is surprising how candid his participants can often be.
You would imagine those traits would be too shameful to admit — but, at least in the laboratory, people open up, and their answers do seem to correlate with real-life bullying, both in adolescence and adulthood.
They are also more likely to be unfaithful to their spouses particularly those with Machiavellian and psychopathic tendencies and to cheat on tests. Even so, since Paulhus tends to focus on everyday evil rather than criminal or psychiatric cases, the traits are by no means apparent on the first meeting.
But it catches your attention here or there.
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