If we assume that World War 2 was the most destructive event in history, it doesn’t tell us anything about the trends of in war and peace. Pinker rejects that epochs of war are cyclical (a common suggestion) or Toynbee’s suggestion that WWII was a step in an escalating staircase. Like many depressing prospects, both … Read more
There are less homicides today among unrelated men. But there has not been as much decline in violence within families (women or kin). Manuals such as Everyday Etiquette and Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior used to be serious sources of moral conduct. Erasmus, one of the great foudners of modernity, wrote an etiquette … Read more
In the Leviathan, Hobbes explains the logic of violence in a fewer than a hundred words (as good as any explanation you can find today). So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for … Read more
Pinker starts with pointing a hypocrisy that exists across all religions, but in particular, Christianity. Modern day Christians pay lip service to the Bible as their moral guide, but their morality really comes from other sources. The saints that are celebrated in Christianity all died in gruesome ways. They went through extreme forms of torture … Read more
Nature has no use for anything that cannot reproduce abundantly. Nature cares more about the species than the organism. That is why through the struggle of natural selection, quantity has been set as the prerequisite to quality – large litters, big families, the race of a thousand sperms. Nature does not care that a high … Read more
We usually think that competition is a form of cooperation since all sides must adhere to the laws of the game, but cooperation is also a form of competition, it is a tool for competition. “Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life – peaceful when food abounds, violent … Read more
The Red Queen is about how humans behave, and what led them to behave this way. Ridley compares the human mammal to other animals, and finds patterns that we have in common. The most universal of those patterns, Ridley argues, is sexuality. The explanations for why males and females exist, why they behave differently, why … Read more
Mankind is a self-domesticated animal; a social ape; an ape in which the male takes the initiative in courtship and females usually leave home; an ape in which men are predators, women herbivorous foragers; an ape in which males are hierarchical, females egalitarian. An ape in which males invest heavily in offspring by providing their … Read more
Are beauty standards cultural whims or innate drives? Incest may give us a hint. Freud thought that incest is a taboo that originated in people’s attraction to ther opposite sex parents, because it would result in birth defects. But there are several objections to this theory. First, sexual attraction is not the same as attraction. … Read more
“Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” is a seminal work by Jared Diamond published in 1997. The book seeks to explain why Eurasian civilizations, as a whole, have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic … Read more