The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

Then, three years after Goodall’s book was printed, a series of incidents occurred that horrified her. The tribe of chimps Goodall had been watching became quite large. Food was harder to find. Quarrels broke out. To relieve the pressure, the unit finally split into two separate tribes. One band stayed in the old home territory. The other left to c

This pious self-aggrandizement of a conquering barbarian tribe led to the Indian caste system.

You can see a similar biological conservation device at work in yourself. You sit down to a meal. A half-hour or less after you’ve started eating, you begin to feel warm.582 The food you’re chewing hasn’t reached your bloodstream yet—in fact, it will take hours before it is digested.583 So where does the sudden spurt of fuel that warms you come fro

When the pecking order status of a national superorganism slides, a frustrated populace looks for someone to blame, preferably a character located conveniently close to home.

Then, in 1962, the Scottish ecologist V. C. Wynne-Edwards, a careful observer of his country’s native red grouse, concluded that these birds sometimes sacrificed their reproductive privileges to keep their flock from starvation. The grouse, Wynne-Edwards contended, gauged the amount of food the moors could provide each year and adjusted their behav

Eventually, Ike went to Camp David for five weeks of rest. It was the worst thing he could have done. Stripped of his sense of social purpose, he went into severe depression, the first setback Eisenhower had experienced since his heart attack. The ailing chief executive recovered only when he was allowed to go back to work.

when we are pathetically attempting to deal with the invisible, when we .have the least evidence of reality, that is when we are most vulnerable to the power of the experts.

Men were designed for short, nasty, brutal lives. Women are designed for long, miserable ones. Dr. Estelle Ramey

A rise or fall in the hierarchy of superorganisms has other profound effects on a society’s collective psyche. It transforms the emotions and shared values of the human herd. The nation moving up embraces adventure. The country moving down abandons the strange and buries its head in the familiar. It tries to march backward in time. These shifts in