The Story Virus

Family glue is strongest between parents and children, because genes “know” that copies of themselves live in their container’s direct progeny. Genes also have us selfishly caring about the well-being of siblings and nieces and nephews because a very similar version of themselves lives in them—but we don’t care quite as much about these people as w... See more

If an animal’s life is a game of chasing good feelings and avoiding bad ones, the animal’s environment is the obstacle course standing between it and all those delicious chemical rewards.

This is the power of human beliefs. Not only do they produce an endless array of behavioral varieties—a million little evolutionary experiments—they allow for the complete behavioral mutation of any one of them within a single generation. Sometimes within a single day.

In the last chapter, we met the human giant.

Every night after the Johnsons put Lulu to bed, she waits until they leave the room and then she crawls out the window to go riding around with the bad baby (Lulu’s friend) who lives down the block.

But gluing together is a behavior. And human behavior lives in a magic laboratory of variety.Could that additional flexibility find a way to create a human beehive?

But instead they tell her about Santa Claus. They tell Lulu that A) Santa Claus is omniscient—he knows when she’s been sleeping and he knows when she’s awake and he knows when she’s been bad or good; and B) when Santa breaks into their house next Christmas, he’ll leave presents for her if and only if she’s been good.

Now consider ten human tribes, living, like the ten wolf packs, in a common natural environment. The human capability for delusion means that those ten tribes could vary widely in their perceptions of reality, and thus behave entirely different from one another.