Sublime

Tribal affiliation turns off more brain cells than any other activity 

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’?

whether animals solve their ecological problems on their own by individual trial-and-error learning (and social groups form only because animals converge on rich food patches) or do so socially and live in groups in order to make this possible.

Part III is about the third principle: Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primat

In a few remarkable pages of The Descent of Man, Darwin made the case for group selection, raised the principal objection to it, and then proposed a way around the objection: When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe included a great number of courageous, s

Humans are pretty smart, as individuals. But in groups, we're capable of breathtaking feats of stupidity. We're going to examine some of these herd dynamics in Book II. For now, it's enough to know that there are strong cultural, social, and biological forces that conspire to make it really hard to make good trade-offs.

First, social, and hence brain, evolution may have been driven mainly by female interests.