Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

consider the metaphors that we routinely use in the English language to explain our emotions: Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things; Kövesces, Metaphor.

SURVIVAL OF THE KINDEST

 

In November 1943, S. L. A. “Slam” Marshall, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel: S. L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947/2000).

they would reach contrasting conclusions: For an excellent summary of early evolutionary views of altruism, see Helena Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chap. 15.

In Descent, Darwin argued that the social instincts: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871), chap. 4.

“The following proposition”: Ibid., 84.

“Such actions as the above”: Ibid., 95.

at the top of my list would be the field notes of a Cro-Magnon anthropologist: Several books portray the social lives of our hominid predecessors: David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). 139–332; Stephen Mithen, After the Ice: A Global History of Human History 20,000 to 5000 BC (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Nicholas Wade Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 51–180.

A detailed portrayal of the day in the life of our hominid predecessors would shed light on our environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA): John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 163–228.

We can turn to studies of our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos in particular: Several books capture the social dimensions of mammalian evolution that lay the foundation for the analysis of emotions that I offer: Frans B. M. de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); John R. Krebs and Nicholas B. Davies, An Introduction to Behavioral Ecology (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1993); Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992); Frans B. M. de Waal, ed., Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 121–43; Marc Hauser, The Evolution of Communication, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

first attempts at visual art and music: Stephen Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); D. Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).

detailed observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies: Paul R. Ehrlich, Human Natures. Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect (New York: Penguin, 2002); Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (New York: Holt, 2003); Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Human Ethology (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989).

the prevalence of caregiving, a hallmark feature of higher primates: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has written brilliantly about the prevalence of caretaking behavior in different primates and how it is an often overlooked basis of alliances and strategic exchanges. Hrdy, Mother Nature (New York: Ballantine, 1999). For a rigorous discussion of human caregiving, read Shelley E. Taylor, The Tending Instinct (New York: Henry Holt, 2002).

as Frans de Waal has observed: de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), chap. 2.

Our hominid predecessors evolved bigger brains: Ehrlich, Human Natures, chap. 6.

“carried in a sling”: Konner, The Tangled Wing, 306.