The Goodness Paradox

Why are day-to-day interactions between individual humans are extraordinarily peaceful, especially when compared to our closest relatives, the chimpanzee and their legendarily docile cousins, the bonobo? Despite our apparently peaceable nature, why are we also so effective at organising mass destruction? Richard Wrangham wrestles with the paradox at the heart of human behaviour. Drawing on new research by geneticists, neuroscientists, primatologists, and archaeologists, he argues that in the past, the least cooperative and most aggressive among us were eliminated by nothing less than the invention of capital punishment. The process domesticated us and gave us our exceptional docility, but with it came our capacity for organised atrocity.