Nicholas Wade

Over the big sweep of history, we've become less violent.

I mean, within societies, we don't treat each other so horribly, cruelly as we used to.

We didn't have public hangings or debtors' prisons or child labor.

So the level of violence within societies has gone down.

I don't think anyone really knows why.

There could be a genetic explanation, which is simply that people who are very violent are ostracized.

People don't want Moran.

And maybe people who are very violent have less children than people who are peacefully inclined.

Looking outside societies, we have far fewer wars than we used to have.

Or rather, we have far fewer men as a proportion of the population killed in wars.

In primitive societies, people used to go to war every day.

I mean, they didn't have mass casualties, but if you lost one guy a week, then pretty soon, men over the course of their lives, it was like a 30% chance of dying in battle in hunter-gatherer societies.

So our chances of dying in battle, thankfully, are very small.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

We should understand and acknowledge what is there and sort of work with it rather than against it.

I think there are two big ways in which we are running into trouble.

One is the fertility crisis.

We have undermined the human family and the way evolution organized it to produce, nurture, and raise children.

And it's been a good reason to free women from all the duties of the home and looking after children.

And it's true, looking after children is a great chore.