Richard Wrangham

The premise of The Goodness Paradox takes some real effort to absorb, let alone accept. It is that Homo sapiens is actually mild mannered and non-violent, pointing to its self-domestication. That any species which can routinely slaughter its own in the millions while also routinely wiping out entire other species can be considered peaceful compared to wild animals requires some suspension of disbelief. That Richard Wrangham pulls it off so splendidly is a tribute to decades of research, a show more very well documented book, and a fairness exhibited in every chapter.

Wrangham does it by splitting violence into two types: proactive aggression and reactive aggression. Proactive aggressive coalitions are groups at the command of despots, from bullies to presidents-for-life. They kill individuals, families, clans and nations - when they assess that the action will be cost-free to them personally. Proactive aggression is planned and controlled, or at least purposely unleashed. Reactive aggression is a reaction, a self-defense mechanism, a fight or flight decision. It is a level of self-control that allows individuals and clans to back away from massacre, war, or fights. The tamer the species, the less reactive aggression it exhibits.

Some (Hobbesians) say Man is naturally violent, and needs Society to keep him under control. Others (Rousseauians) say Man is naturally peaceful, and Society has corrupted him into violence. Wrangham says both are right. And that’s the paradox. Then he proves both are right in no uncertain terms.

The difference between humans and animals is that you can set two unfamiliar two-year-old humans beside each other and they will not attack each other. We interact peacefully as the default option. We are helpful and altruistic without training. Chimpanzees – not so much. Chimpanzees fight every day. They will gang up on the alpha male and kill him, torture and kill females, and bite of the heads off infants. Chimps turn out to be so viciously brutal that Wrangham prefers to compare us to Neanderthals and previous editions of Homo, rather than our supposed nearest relatives.

The bulk of the book is based on the truly remarkable process of domestication. It’s not just cows and dogs and chickens that have been our charges for thousands of years. Wrangham tells the story of Dmitry Belyaev, who examined and fostered the process of domesticating wild silver foxes and minks in the USSR, even just in his own lifetime. He studied from generation to generation, while the foxes and minks changed physically as they became tamer.

More remarkably perhaps, domestication can be a self-administered process. There are examples in many species where branches have self-domesticated, with no input from Man. It happens all the time on islands, where predators and/or competition are no longer factors.

The Congo River separates chimpanzees to the north, from bonobos to the south. Bonobos self-domesticated in their more peaceful environment. Where chimps are vicious, bonobos are cuter, cuddlier, tamer, and far less violent. They both come from the same ancestor.

The physical difference between bonobos and chimps is dramatic, and Wrangham shows decisively that it comes from domestication. Skulls are smaller, canine teeth shrink, bodies become smaller and there is a dramatic shift to juvenility, called paedomorphism. They become cuter and infantilized. The physical differences between males and females reduce as well. In many species, white areas appear in the fur on the forehead or as “socks” marking the animal as domesticated. Temperamentally, domesticated animals show Increased social tolerance and reduction in reactive aggressiveness. Domesticated animals are therefore peaceful - as we have come to expect.

So the question arises: is Man self-domesticated? Wrangham shows it unquestionably. Earlier versions of Homo were bigger and stronger. Male faces protruded – they were not as flat as ours. Heads were larger, and so were bodies. A fascinating sidelight is that people are innately afraid of broad-faced men. Study after study shows it. Broad faces represent a much more fierce and threatening being that Man has not forgotten. Narrow-faced men are automatically more trustworthy.

Wrangham then pulls out a new key differentiator: language. It is because of language that people began to conform to rules. Reputations, rumors, accusations, trust and judgment all evolved in Man when language emerged. Language, he says, is the foundation of morality itself. Fear of sanction is the motivator. Morality is the polite cover. Language also allows Man to plan destruction.

Where we differ is that Wrangham thinks (like Steven Pinker et al) that violence has been on the wane, and that wars are on their way out. He is optimistic that Man’s domestication is leading toward a more peaceful race of humans, where a lack of threats means no need for war, and more tolerant attitudes will lead to forbearance rather than aggression.

There are at least two things wrong with this argument. First, the longer we go without war, the more romantic it becomes (as Wrangham himself points out). When World War I broke out, there was universal cheering, and thousands rushed to enlist, to fight the battle over – nothing. For the US Civil War, wives, mothers and children packed lunches to enjoy at the battles (at a safe distance, of course).

Second, although there has been a major reprieve since the unprecedented bloodletting of World War II, there is the ever more ominous and realistic scenario of new wars breaking out all over the world because of climate change. Those without water will have to move. So will those without land. And those whose crops no longer grow mean millions who are hungry will be on the march as well. Countries will close their borders to immigrants, unprecedented waves of them will cause chaos, and several opportunistic nations will feel obliged to grab what they can while they can. This sort of proactive aggression is Man’s specialty, not available in other species, again due to language. It’s not possible to pull together an armed force of chimps, despite their proclivity towards violence. But organizing supposedly peaceful men to kill is a well-worn path.

The Goodness Paradox is outside the box thinking writ large. It changes the perspective of where Man fits in the scheme of things. It explains a lot that has been inexplicable. And Wrangham offers all sides to every argument, so readers can see that the bases have been covered. It is at very least a revelation.

David Wineberg show less

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

The human mind is plagued by a host of biases, and one of the most prominent is the “false dilemma” fallacy. This fallacy occurs whenever two choices are presented as the only options when a spectrum of possible choices exist, and is especially prevalent in debates regarding human nature.

Human nature is often show more presented as either innately good and corrupted by society (following Jean Jacques Rousseau) or as innately bad and civilized by society (following Thomas Hobbes). As you can imagine, the truth is much more complicated.

In The Goodness Paradox, Richard Wrangham presents a more nuanced view of human nature—informed by decades of research in primate behavior and evolutionary psychology—that accounts for the complex interplay between genetic predispositions and cultural forces that compel both good and evil behavior.

The first thing to note is that humans are, by the standards of nature, abnormally nonviolent. Our closest evolutionary cousins, chimpanzees, are 100 to 1,000 times more violent and aggressive than humans. Even bonobos, which are known for their tameness, are also quite a bit more aggressive compared to humans. Chimpanzees have the tendency, for example, to brutally and fatally attack, as part of a group, lone chimpanzees in neighboring territories at alarming rates. And, as Wrangham wrote, “one hundred percent of wild adult female chimpanzees experience regular serious beatings from males.”

So humans are, relatively speaking, extremely nonaggressive in terms of violence within a group or local community. At the same time, humanity has the potential to produce death on unimaginable scales during times of war. Hundreds of millions of people died as a result of the two world wars, and countless others have died in wars throughout history. There seems to be a paradox involving our abnormally nonviolent behavior in local groups and our extraordinarily violent behavior in war. How can we account for this?

Wrangham is proposing that the answer to this paradox lies in the difference between proactive and reactive aggression. Reactive aggression is an emotional reaction based on anger or fear in response to an immediate provocation or threat. Chimpanzees display high levels of reactive aggression whereas humans do not.

Proactive aggression, on the other hand, is cooly planned and coordinated to achieve some type of internal or external goal. It is not a response to an immediate provocation but rather a planned attack for the achievement of a stated goal. Humans display the highest levels of proactive aggression in nature.

To illustrate the difference between reactive and proactive aggression, Wrangham writes:

“The anthropologist Sarah Hrdy noted that to pack hundreds of chimpanzees into close quarters on an airplane would be to invite violent chaos, whereas most human passengers behave sedately even when they are crowded. As Dale Peterson observed, however, intense screening is needed to ensure that a secret enemy will not carry a bomb on board. The contrast illustrates the difference between our low propensity for reactive aggression and our high propensity for proactive aggression.”

Humans, due to their unique ability for language, abstract thinking, and emotional control, are not only equipped for greater proactive aggression, they have actively used it throughout history to select for individuals with lower reactive aggression. Our evolutionary history therefore predisposes us to both high levels of proactive aggression and to low levels of reactive aggression.

The “execution hypothesis” demonstrates how. According to Wrangham, the execution hypothesis “proposes that selection against aggressiveness and in favor of greater docility came from execution of the most antisocial individuals.”

Our ancestors developed coalitions of a large number of egalitarian males that would eliminate bullies and other miscreants (with high levels of reactive aggression) by killing them. This transformed human societies from alpha-male dominated hierarchies to egalitarian coalitions that did not tolerate selfish or aggressive behavior. With an enhanced ability to gossip, plan, and coordinate attacks, egalitarian groups became more powerful than single alpha-males. This selection for more docile humans occurred over thousands of generations to produce self-domesticated modern humans.

The evidence for this is of two types. The first is that virtually every known ancient culture engaged in capital punishment, and that ancient remains show signs of violent injuries. As Wrongham wrote:

“Capital punishment was present in all the earliest civilizations, from Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman to Indian, Chinese, Inca, and Aztec. It happened not only for violent crimes but also for nonconformism (as is Socrates’s case), for minor felonies, and even some heartbreakingly trivial matters such as malpractice in selling beer (according to the Code of Hammurabi), or stealing the keys to one’s husband’s wine cellar (according to the laws of the early Roman Republic).”

The second line of evidence is indirect, but is part of a larger phenomenon known as the “domestication syndrome.” Charles Darwin first noticed that domesticated animals displayed certain characteristics that differed from their wild ancestors, such as tameness, floppy ears, white patches of fur, and juvenile faces with smaller jaws. Modern genetics has since discovered that all of these traits may be the result of changes to neural crest cells that are responsible for both physical characteristics and for changes in the adrenal glands (resulting in less fearfulness).

The interesting thing is that humans, compared to our evolutionary forebears, show these same physical and behavioral traits shared by other domesticated species. Modern humans are smaller (with smaller jaw lines), tamer, and more docile compared to our distant ancestors (and Neanderthals), just as dogs are tamer and smaller than wolves and bonobos are tamer and smaller than chimpanzees.

We know that humans can selectively breed silver foxes for tameness that turns them, behaviorally speaking, into dogs. Wrangham's revelation is that we did the same thing to ourselves by “selecting” for docility in humans by killing aggressive individuals over thousands of generations. Our tendency for proactive aggression resulted in a reduction in reactive aggression.

This seems to adequately resolve the paradox. One might wonder if our enhanced intelligence and ability to cooperate would explain the difference, and that reactive aggression is simply suppressed as a result of our superior emotional control. But higher intelligence and social cooperation does not seem to adequately explain the docility and lack of aggression we witness in most humans.

This has moral implications as well. While Wrangham recognizes that genes do not determine behavior, and that we are not prisoners to our biology or to anything that is “natural,” our evolutionary past and self-domestication explains much of our moral behavior. In an environment where egalitarian coalitions have the power to kill nonconformists, reputation suddenly becomes of paramount importance. This explains a host of our behaviors and emotions, such as guilt, shame, and embarrassment, and why we all care so much about what others think of us and why we feel the desire to punish wrongdoers (a tendency not found in chimpanzees).

And so we arrive at a disturbing conclusion. Our nonviolent tendencies from reduced reactive aggression is the result of our increased capacity for organized and planned violence toward those we deem to be different. As Wrangham writes, this makes our moral priority going forward quite clear: finding ways to reduce our capacity for organized violence and war. show less

This book will show you an interesting anthropological perspective to the problems of both intercommunity and domestic violence in human societies. My takeaway was "Sisters Unite! It's up to us to support and protect each other, like the female bonobos do".

As I live in an area that is perhaps the world capital of raw food veganism, the contrarian in me just had to read How Cooking Made Us Human. [disclaimer: I'm naturally a quasi-vegetarian, although I eat plenty of fish, eggs & poultry] Wrangham's thesis is a fairly simple one: it's not "man" the hunter but rather "man" the fire-tender and cook who best explains the change from australopithecine (habiline)to human (homo erectus). As cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain show more from food, less energy has to be expended in chewing and digesting raw foods, which allows us to have smaller intestines than our ancestors the great apes and frees up energy for our larger brains. ("Cooked food is better than raw food because life is mostly concerned with energy. So from an evolutionary perspective, if cooking causes a loss of vitamins or creates a few long-term toxic compounds, the effect is relatively unimportant compared to the impact of more calories.") Wrangham posits a secondary claim that is both intriguing and more debatable. He proposes cooking as the technical invention that "made possible one of the most distinctive features of human society: the modern form of the sexual division of labor." He goes on to say that while men have historically engaged in cooking when alone or for ceremonial purposes, domestic cooking has been an almost exclusively female activity. And it is to the dominant male's need to secure his source of cooked food and the physically "smaller and weaker" female's need for a "food guard" that we can attribute the advent of patriarchy. Thus, in the author's view, the advent of patriarchy dates not from the invention of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago, but rather much earlier, at the very beginnings of our species. I find this argument a bit reductive as it fails to explain how human females came to be "smaller and weaker" in the first place. If sexual selection prompts humans of both sexes to choose the most evolutionarily fit and healthy members of the opposite sex for reproduction and if size and strength are accurate indicators of such fitness and health, then it would make sense that females would choose larger and stronger males as mates and that over time, size differences between the sexes would increase. However, wouldn't males also choose larger and stronger females as more reproductively fit with the result of equalizing size and strength between the genders? That said, I can't help finding some amusement in the author's statement that "females feed males to reward them for behaving well." How Cooking Made Us Human presents a strong argument for cooked food as THE cultural innovation that resulted in humans, while leaving some questions unanswered regarding the advent of patriarchy with its division of labor and attribution of social power and status according to gender. show less