Quotessence
Home / Books / Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Book by Robert M. Sapolsky · 2 quotes · Evolution, Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology

Filter quotes by topic

AllEvolutionPsychologyEvolutionary PsychologyGenesMoralityMindStressBehaviorBiologyBrainCognitionDopamineInequalityLifeMaleRewardScienceTestosteroneAggressionAgriculture

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst Quotes

“Hunter-gatherer societies have typically been egalitarian, as we'll soon see, throughout hominin history. Inequality emerged when stuff, things to possess and accumulate, was invented following animal domestication and the development of agriculture. The more stuff, reflecting surplus, job specialization, and technological sophistication, the greater the potential inequality. Moreover, inequality expands enormously when cultures invent inheritance within families. Once invented, inequality became pervasive. Among traditional pastoralists or small-scale agricultural societies, levels of wealth inequality match or exceed those in the most unequal industrialized societies. Why have stratified cultures dominated the planet, generally replacing more egalitarian ones? For population biologist Peter Turchin, the answer is that stratified cultures are ideally suited to being conquerors. They come with chains of command. Both empirical and theoretical work suggest that in addition, in unstable environments, stratified societies are better able to survive resource shortages than egalitarian cultures by sequestering mortality to the lower classes. In other words, when times are tough, the unequal access to wealth becomes the unequal distribution of misery and death.”

CultureWealthClassResourcesInequalityAgricultureWestern SocietyHunter GatherersEgalitarian
Book:Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Create image

“Agriculture makes people dependent on a few domesticated crops and animals instead of hundreds of wild food sources, creating vulnerability to droughts and blights and zoonotic diseases. Agriculture makes for sedentary living, leaving humans to do something that no primate with a concern for hygiene and public health would ever do: namely, living in close proximity to their feces. Agriculture makes for surplus and thus almost inevitably, the uneven distribution of surplus generating socio-economic status differences that dwarf anything that other primates cook up with their hierarchies. And from there it's just a hop, skip and a jump until we've got Mr. McGregor persecuting Peter Rabbit and people incessantly singing Oklahoma.”

WarInequalityAgricultureHunter Gatherers
Book:Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Create image