(00:00) Intro and T-Shirts
(05:50) News wrap-up: Covid vaccines, states prematurely lifting their Covid restrictions, and of course “cancel culture,” Governor Cuomo, QAnon, Trump’s worsening fortunes, and the SpaceX Starship!
(52:08) The Execution Hypothesis, is the hypothesis that homo sapiens went through a process of self-domestication by killing the most violent troublemakers in our species. Over many thousands of generations, we humans reduced our capacity for reactive aggression.
Today’s show is a part of our continuing coverage on The Radical Secular Podcast which began with episodes 29 and 31. Our discussion is based on Richard Wrangham’s book The Goodness Paradox. Today we’ll cover chapters 5, 6, and 7.
This isn’t just another anthropological digression. Everything we’re going to talk about today connects directly to our cultural disagreements, who’s entitled to what share of our common resources, the entire divide between democrats and republicans.
We’re going to revisit our central civilizational conflict, between the strict father / punishing / scarcity mentality more closely related to Chimpanzees, and the nurturing mother / cooperative / sharing type of society exemplified by Bonobos. This couldn’t be more relevant to America’s political divide, which really isn’t a divide at all. It’s more of a death struggle between a culture of cooperation and human rights vs. a culture of oppression. And it’s a very very old struggle, as we’ll find out. Our history’s brutal, but we wouldn’t be here without it.
(01:26:30) Outro
Show Notes:
The Goodness Paradox: By Richard Wrangham
