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The Distinctiveness of Human Aggression (2022)


The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham—A Review

The “self-domestication hypothesis” is the idea that in the ancestral environment, early human communities collectively killed individuals prone to certain forms of aggression: arrogance, bullying, random violence, and monopolizing food and sexual partners. The eminent Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham explores these findings at length in his fascinating 2019 book The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution. Against outsiders it is meritorious to kill, plunder, practice blood revenge, and steal women and slaves, but inside the group none of these things can be allowed because they would produce discord and weakness.”

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