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In other words, nature is a school of hard knocks that knows nothing of diversity, equity, and inclusion quotas, and the successful graduates are those species—our own among them—that ran the gauntlet https://quillette.com/2019/04/03/the-goodness-paradox-a-review/
"natural selection over the last few hundred thousand years has produced a considerably less querulous and more docile, collaborative, and feminized species."
"Humans, Wrangham says, have been pacifying and domesticating themselves, in no small part thanks to the greater ability of females “to choose the less aggressive males as mates”"
"Along with a gentler temperament, evolution has been selecting in favor of males less inclined to compete for status than, say, the stouter and more broadly masculine Neanderthals."
But there is a dangerous idea here - we are not "both angels and demons ...but that we are demons because we have managed to pacify ourselves."
"Having grown into a docile, cooperative, and feminized species is just what makes us capable of large-scale evil." https://quillette.com/2019/04/03/the-goodness-paradox-a-review/
"Beta males had a tool which the petulant, overbearing alpha male lacked: the ability to cooperate and coordinate their action. This action consisted mainly of capital punishment."
This is interesting - apparently in hunter gatherer societies, men who cannot control their aggression will often come to a bad end, killed by others in the group.
"Among the cooperative and consultative ways of organizing life created by domesticated mankind is the invention of warfare: a deliberate, cool-headed, organized method of wielding aggression."
"Domestication gave man the ability to control his temper but also to channel it into long-term projects of conquest and subjugation." https://quillette.com/2019/04/03/the-goodness-paradox-a-review/
"We are lethally violent because we have grown quiet, deliberative, and cooperative, and thus able to visit organized, methodical, genocidal violence upon fellow human beings."
"In short, there is no contradiction between Hobbes and Rousseau: we are Hobbesian because we have evolved into little Émiles. We are wolves in sheepskin and the sheepskin is to blame." Wow.
"Truly devilish large-scale harm is not committed by the frothing bully; it is done by well-mannered, affable, intellectual, and comparatively feminized coalition builders like, say, Torquemada, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot"
Human evolution has produced a more peaceable, collaborative and 'domesticated' ape species. But did that come at a terrible price? https://quillette.com/2019/04/03/the-goodness-paradox-a-review/
