In the 10,000 years or so since we humans began leaving our small tribe past behind and started living in larger and larger towns, cities, and states, we have created a litany of laws and social norms intended to curb our innate aggressiveness and xenophobia.
We have had mixed results. We just haven’t figured a way to overcome wars, genocide, or xenophobic nationalism – and the advent of the internet and social media has helped undo what little progress we had made in the post World War ll era.
Scientific disciplines like neuroscience, genetic science, and evolutionary psychology have made huge strides over the last 50 years in explaining the foundations of our behavior. Unfortunately, we have done little to use that information to learn how to better curb our proven predispositions toward violence and xenophobia, or to increase cooperation within individual cultures or between cultural groups.
This blog’s purpose is to illuminate the roots of human behavior in the belief that understanding will lead to strategies for learning the broad- based cooperation we will need to survive as a species.
Human Behavior: an evolutionary perspective 