Sublime

Homo sapiens evolved to think of people as divided into us and them. ‘Us’ was the group immediately around you, whoever you were, and ‘them’ was everyone else. In fact, no social animal is ever guided by the interests of the entire species to which it belongs. No chimpanzee cares about the interests of the chimpanzee species, no snail

“I have to say, you’re wrong. Natural selection is a universal principle, which applies to all living things, but it can take all sorts of forms. It exists even in the plant world, where it’s a matter of access to nutritious soil, to water, to sunlight … Man is an animal, as we know, but he’s not a prairie dog or an antelope. His dominance doesn’t

Of the many emerging descriptions of our social brain, for me the simplest and most elegant is the highly regarded Social Baseline Theory of Lane Beckes and James A. Coan, two researchers at the University of Virginia.

Our global success is due, at least in part, to a specific evolutionary trait: the ability to share attention with others.

In societies that are essentially social contracts (as all human societies are), freeloaders who take the benefits of the contract but avoid paying all the costs erode trust in other members of the community and quickly lead to the collapse of society.

If evolution chanced upon a way to bind people together into large groups, the most obvious glue is oxytocin, a hormone and neurotransmitter produced by the hypothalamus. Oxytocin is widely used among vertebrates to prepare females for motherhood. In mammals it causes uterine contractions and milk letdown, as well as a powerful motivation to touch

When the eyes were watching, Bateson’s colleagues left nearly three times as much money in the honesty box.

We humans have this same system. We activate it day in, day out in our interactions with each other. We experience the uptake of endorphins in the brain as that feeling of warmth that we associate with physical contact with intimates,