Livre - The goodness paradox

It may not always seem so, but day-to-day interactions between individual humans are extraordinarily peaceful. That is not to say that we are perfect, just far less violent than most animals, especially our closest relatives, the chimpanzee and their legendarily docile cousins, the bonobo. But there is one form of violence in which humans exceed all other animals by several degrees: organised violence against other group of humans. In The Goodness Paradox, Richard Wrangham wrestles with this 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 agressive among us were eleminated 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 atrocity.