Coltan Scrivner

Richard Wrangham, he's a biological anthropologist at Harvard.

He's done a lot of work on human violence.

Two books on violence you really like.

Oh, yeah, yeah, juicy.

He's great.

His work is where I got this idea from.

He talks about this shift in human evolution where once we developed language, we could now conspire with each other to overthrow a much stronger dominant jerk who is domineering the group, right?

If you don't have a favor among your group, then they can work together.

No matter how tough you are, three other members can kill you.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And that shifted the social dynamics of humans a lot.

And it did another thing.

So Wrangham says we domesticated ourselves basically through that process.

We got rid of our reactive tendencies to a degree.

Humans are still reactively aggressive, particularly males.

Bar fights exist, but they exist far less than if we were chimps.

We would not be able to sit in this room together having never met.

Something would have happened.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.