Speaker
Richard Wrangham
Affiliation
Harvard University
Presentation
The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evoluation
Details
Event Description
A key problem for any evolutionary explanation of human cooperation is why humans tend to have a very low propensity for face-to-face aggression, because without this unusual feature trust and cooperation would be strongly inhibited. Our species’ relative docility appears to have resulted from a process of self-domestication that has lasted about 300,000 years and happened because men conspired to use proactive violence to kill hyper-aggressive bullies. Self-domestication is expected to be a widespread phenomenon in animal evolution, suggesting diverse opportunities to test these ideas.
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