Sublime

our mainstream culture’s self-congratulatory obsession with humaniqueness blinds us to the vast amount of animate intelligence we share with our fellow creatures.

His advantage: he thinks like a scientist. He’s passionately dispassionate.

As far as evolution is concerned, if a behaviour is beneficial, we can attach any reason to it that we like.

Whenever an animal displays complex emotional behaviour, we cannot prove that this is not the result of some

So is it humans who are murderous,or men? And if women aren’t on the whole murdering, what are we to think of female ‘phylogenetics’?

An evolutionary anthropologist and a specialist in primate studies, he argues that while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way. Carefully working throu

The more we value the group, the more likely we are to be influenced by it, even if other members don’t share the same demographic makeup.

Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, and author of the best basic explanatory tome on Darwinism, Why Evolution Is True

It doesn’t require a large leap of speculative evolutionary psychology to arrive at the reasonable conclusion that Homo sapiens are well adapted to small-group collaboration.