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The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

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Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt is an American psychologist known for his research in moral psychology and social psychology. His work focuses on moral judgment, political ideology, and religious beliefs. Haidt's book, 'The Righteous Mind,' explores the evolution of morality and ideology and how they shape human behavior and social structures. more

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“...killing other members of our own species -a rarity in the animal kingdom- is a male behavior that evolved early in our history, because those individuals who manifested such a predisposition were more likely to transmit their genes to the next generation than those who didn't. War and violence, then, are indelibly linked to sex and reproduction.”

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“Systematic rape is one of the most hideous, and most explicitly male, expressions of warfare, but it is hardly the only one. All wars are extraordinarily costly in material terms and grotesquely painful in human terms. Yet wars are so much a part of the human experience that we don't always pause to realize that one of the most astonishing aspects of war is the very fact that we so regularly go out and deliberately kill members of our own species.”

SexViolenceEvolutionAggressionEvolutionary PsychologyMale
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“In short, controlling more resources means you are likely to have more progeny surviving to future generations: Team aggression is one way that both chimpanzees and humans have hit upon to reap that evolutionary reward.”

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“After World War II, Marxist archaeologists argued that Stone Age societies were economically self-sufficient and therefore incapable of warfare -that is until they excavated skeletons with flint arrows embedded in them.”

SexViolenceEvolutionAggressionEvolutionary PsychologyMale
Book:Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
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“The transition that we make with age reflects not only our growing experience and shifting philosophies, but also a changing willingness to engage in or condone violence. Young men are the revolutionaries, the superstar computer programmers, the best athletes, the most courageous soldiers, the bravest mountaineers, and the most creative musicians, but they are also the most vicious gang members and nearly all the suicidal terrorists.”

SexViolenceEvolutionAggressionEvolutionary PsychologyMale
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“On the spectrum of team aggression, street gangs are one step nearer to a preliterate raiding party than to terrorists and therefore they are perceived as less threatening -they only destroy themselves. Some aspects of gang behavior do parallel chimpanzee raids, but in an urban jungle. -Gang warfare- is driven by the two basic emotions that also fuel chimpanzee and preliterate warfare -territory and revenge, or just being from another neighborhood. Merely belonging to another gang is enough reason to justify an attack, as also happens with the chimpanzees of Gombe. Unlike terrorists who attack a perceived outgroup for ideological reasons, in the case of Al Qaeda by mounting attacks halfway across the world, gangs fight their neighbors for what they perceive as territory and resources.”

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Book:Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
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“Abandoned weapons and corpses may be washed away, removed by animals, dismembered by the victors as trophies, or buried, burned, or otherwise disposed of by the vanquished after defeat. It is reasonable to expect that direct archaeological evidence of warfare will be limited, and that it will actually tend to underestimate the frequency and bloody nature of past conflicts.”

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“For history and biology also show that even if we are a violent species, in which males have an inborn predisposition to engage in team aggression, the specific conditions of our environment, culture, economic well-being, and demographic structure can have dramatic impacts on how our most fundamental impulses are expressed.”

SexViolenceEvolutionAggressionEvolutionary PsychologyMale
Book:Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
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