Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend

by Barbara Oakley

Have you ever heard of a person who left you wondering, "How could someone be so twisted? So evil?" Prompted by clues in her sister’s diary after her mysterious death, author Barbara Oakley takes the reader inside the head of the kinds of malevolent people you know, perhaps all too well, but could never understand.

Starting with psychology as a frame of reference, Oakley uses cutting-edge images of the working brain to provide startling support for the idea that "evil" people act the way they do mainly as the result of a dysfunction. In fact, some deceitful, manipulative, and even sadistic behavior appears to be programmed genetically—suggesting that some people really are born to be bad.

Oakley links the latest findings of molecular research to a wide array of seemingly unrelated historical and current phenomena, from the harems of the Ottomans and the chummy jokes of "Uncle Joe" Stalin, to the remarkable memory of investor Warren Buffet. Throughout, she never loses sight of the personal cost of evil genes as she unravels the mystery surrounding her sister’s enigmatic life—and death.

Evil Genes is a tour-de-force of popular science writing that brilliantly melds scientific research with intriguing family history and puts both a human and scientific face to evil.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, Philosophy, History, Sociology, Evolution

459 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2007

About the author

Barbara Oakley, PhD, a 'female Indiana Jones,' is one of the few women to hold a doctorate in systems engineering. She chronicled her adventures on Soviet fishing boats in the Bering Sea in Hair of the Dog: Tales from Aboard a Russian Trawler. She also served as a radio operator in Antarctica and rose from private to captain in the U.S. Army. Now an associate professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan, Oakley is a recent vice president of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Her work has appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times to the IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience.

Reviews

[Anita Dalton · Rating 1 out of 5]

So, let's see... Author's sister, who had polio, was physically disabled as a result of the disease and as a child spent a long time in an isolated ward and grew up to be disconnected from her family and selfish. Author speculates her sister is DUN DUN DUN, evil, despite giving evidence of her sister being completely screwed up. Screwed up. Not evil. She invokes some of history's worst monsters to compare to her sister, invokes human genetics and muses that the gene for a propensity for getting polio is located near the gene for being an evil monster.

Bad science, bad psychology, and a sister who has a vendetta against her dead sibling whom she calls evil without even presenting enough information for the casual reader to determine whether or not her sister was an asshole, let alone evil.

This is a bad book and the woman who wrote it should feel bad. Bad. Very, very bad. But she probably doesn't and maybe she should then write a book about what makes people write hit jobs against dead siblings. Perhaps it's evil? Perhaps?

[Ayse_ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lately Barbara Oakley has become one of my favorite writers. She is a philanthropist and a dedicated scientist with great wisdom. Life seems to have given her ample opportunities to study human behavior.

This book is a well rounded study of borderline disorder (mild narcissism to high functioning psychopathic behavior), with many examples from near history. It also casts a light on what may be expected to come. Interestingly it compliments some of the extrapolations from Sapiens (Hariri`s Book), and one of the instances mentioned may come familiar from the Outliers Book (Galdwell). Although she gives examples of leaders and important figures mostly from other countries, her fear of scrutiny from her home country readers is understandable.

The trigger for the book (or her study of the literature which she presents as the book) is her own dysfunctional family and her borderline sister. Without getting bogged down in her own story and emotions she manages to present her sister`s case and those of borderline disorders` wide range of appearances, in a very interesting and engaging read.

[August Dolan-Henderson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Although well written and engaging for the average reader, the author makes frequent and egregious oversimplifications, distorted interpretations and conjecture, potentially leading to erroneous conclusions about the roles of genetic inheritance on personality formation, human behavior and the human capacity for informed choice. She is undoubtedly a very bright and well-read popularizer of "science," but in keeping with the themes of genetic destiny, especially in the case of her "psychopath" sister, Dr. oakley's writings reveal quite a bit about the author herself, i.e. her own narcissism and histrionics, both of which are themselves elements of personality disorders related to psychopathy. As as doctoral level neuroscientist, I wish I hadn't invested my free time to reading this "novel," with its glib, scientistic biases.

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ate this book. It has been a while since I've read a "page-turner", but this unlikely candidate was just that - I could scarcely put it down, much to the annoyance of my neglected husband and children.

Part science writing, part historical analysis, part sociological study, and part personal narrative, this compelling read attempts to answer the questions:
1. Why are some people so cruel and self-serving, apparently devoid of conscience or empathy?
2. How do such people rise to the top in every walk of life and hold sway over their "followers"?

My only criticism of the book is the story of the author's sister - it was hard for me, obviously removed from the situation, to lump Carolyn in with the likes of Hitler, Milosevic, or Chairman Mao - all of the author's anecdotes make her come off as a rather sad, mentally unbalanced woman rather than a force of evil. But then, Carolyn did not have a personal effect upon me or my family and perhaps if she had I would think of her differently.

If you have an interest in psychology, neuroscience, history, or if your life has been touched by an a**hole, you might enjoy this book as much as I did.

[Patrick Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

2020-09-08 - Just came across this article that used one of the cool terms I learned in Evil Genes: "Gaslighting" very neat: https://www.aier.org/article/the-gasl...

2018 - Dec. - Excellent book.
Fascinating tale of how genes and environment can shape behavior in major ways and explain why some people commit evil acts.

An autobiographical thread through the book that makes the science very personal and even more "real" than one might otherwise think.

Great references to back up the logic, science and applications.

I was enthralled from beginning to end with the weaving of genetics, history, personal family tales, moral implications and self-help aspects of the book.

However, when I first started reading the book, about 3-4 years ago, I got bogged down with the genetics and science discussion, and that came after the really gripping beginning. Then I got busy with other projects but always wanted to come back, which I finally did a little over a month ago.

Starting from the beginning a second time was even more exciting and rewarding and provided me a much better head of steam to finish. Very glad I did.

Highly recommended.

[Naomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deals with the science behind Borderline Personality Disorder. I read it almost as a self help book. If you've ever been the victim of a Machiavellian this book will be a comfort to you. It doesn't excuse them but it explains them scientifically and genetically. No, it doesn't say "they can't help it, they are born that way" but that some people have certain predispositions, then add to that contributing factors of their early environment and it makes their brain work in certain subpar ways...which is unfortunate for those of us around them. This helped put things in perspective for me to understand the person who nearly destroyed my life. It also made it easier for me not to blame myself by explaining that these people make it an ART form in manipulating not only friends and family but sometimes entire NATIONS. I was not at fault or gullible. He was just THAT good.

[Mo · Rating 1 out of 5]

At least the author is upfront about her issues with her family dynamic and her older sister. However, comparing her sister's manipulative behavior to Pol Pot, Hitler and other atrocity causing dictators throughout history is disingenuous and bordered on the ridiculous. So your sister stole your mother's boyfriend and used her wiles on men? So? How that compares to the behaviors of men responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people is beyond me.

[Erika Nerdypants · Rating 2 out of 5]

I initially really liked this book. I enjoyed learning about the science of personality disorders such as Borderline and Antisocial personality, particularly since it has only been recently that researchers have found actual changes in the brain of people who suffer from them. I also enjoyed the little tidbits of history's evil figures, and how they may have suffered from personality disorders, (though surely this doesn't come as a surprise to anyone). Where it got murky for me was in the posthumous diagnosing of the author's sister Carolyn, who led a tumultuous life and seemed to lack empathy for others. It was clear to me that this did not come from an unbiased place of writing, but rather from the hurt and confusion that Carolyn had inflicted on her family and friends. Understandable, but for me this has no place in a book that is trying to be scientific. Being so completely biased, made the information suspect for me, because frankly, facts can be presented in such a way that they support almost any point one wants to make. My other quibble, and this is a large one, was that the author used the more problematic traits of several different personality disorders interchangeably, giving the impression that there is very little difference between someone diagnosed with Borderline, antisocial or narcissistic personality disorder, which is simply not true.

[Michael Hagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A year or so after finishing Evil Genes, I've come to believe this may be one of the most important and helpful nonfiction books I've ever read. I say this because it has clarified my understanding of human behavior that defies explanation or any sense of empathy or humanity. We have an estimated 12 million sociopaths running around in American society, and the system, in a bizarre, dehumanized sort of way, favors their unlimited capacity for money, attention, power, success and adulation. Perhaps the most important take-away from this fascinating, important book is this: sociopaths are charming! They have a way of winning us over! But watch how these chaos creators and machiavells manipulate and control the boundaries of common sense, transforming their "noble causes" and "beliefs" into greedy, self-serving nonsense. No one dares call out these so-called leaders (politicians, CEOs, etc.) as the personality types their actions and behavior suggest, and yet, if everyone took the time to read Evil Genes and other books like this one, we might actually have a fighting chance against human beings who are wired so differently from the rest of us. These sociopaths cannot change their capacity for chaos and destruction. They will always have followers. They will never stop fighting for and fueling their own narcissistic impulses. We owe it to ourselves to be more aware of their charming, luring, destructive behavior. This book helps pinpoint such deceptive, frightening behavior. Thank you, Barbara Oakley, for bringing the tendencies of these personality types to light.

[Danny · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've ever had first-hand experience with a family member, spouse, boy/girl friend, or boss who was so two-faced or manipulative that it left your head spinning in wonder as to how a person could behave like that and still manage to sleep at night, this book goes an awful long way to explaining the how and why of it.

It's very readable, and very enlightening when it comes to explaining Borderline Personality Disorder, and Machiavellian personality types. The character studies of people like Mao, Hitler, and Stalin are really fascinating, but there are a couple of chapters which deal with the technical minutia of the physiology, brain chemistry, and genetics behind these disorders, and it might be a bit much for a lot of readers. But the book is written in such a way that you can skip over those bits and still come away without missing anything beyond which alleles do what in which combination, so no worries.

Dealing with people with BPD, or one of its sister disorders, can range from maddening to world shattering. If you're one of the many whose lives have been affected by it, you're definitely going to want to read this book.

[Bob Mayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that is a must-read these days. We need to understand who these evil people in our society are. We must see them for what they are and also realize they cannot be redeemed or changed. They must be dealt with for exactly what they are and not explained away.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

While Oakley's "A Mind for Numbers" is excellent, her other sister, Pamela Grim, had this to say about "Evil Genes" on Amazon:

"I have to say I was a little surprised that our relatively nondescript family would get lumped in with the Hitlers and the Milsovichs of the world. This only goes to show that just because you ride around in the same car with the same group of people all of your childhood doesn't mean each one of you weren't inhabiting alternate universes."

Telling, and a cogent reminder that there are two sides to every story.

[Peter Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable compilation of personal experience and research by neurologists, psychologists, sociologists, and psychiatrists, with powerful historical (spanning the ages) examples, this volume argues that the nature side of the nurture-nature argument needs a great deal more weight than it has received. In addition to the straightforward understanding of extraordinarily confusing people -- sociopaths, psychopaths, but especially borderlines -- reading Oakley's book should give a thoughtful reader new ways to relate to these people, but also organizations of all sizes in which they work their dark magic. I recognized in the book a disturbing number of people from my own life.

Very well written, warm,humorous, real, and offering a profoundly new way to view the human being.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oakley argues that a good part of the population has Machiavellian* or “evil” genes, which means, generally, those people who operate fairly much without regard to the interest of others. This, she says, runs across a range of expression, from indifference to the feelings of others, toward the use and manipulation of others, to the psychopaths who are dangers to others and society.

The value of this book is that the author proposes a genetic basis for “anti-social” behavior.** Some of this behavior is more deterministic (hard-wired) than others. Some of it is a predisposition to act in certain ways, and all of it in varying degrees is affected by environmental circumstance. Yet, there is a troubling side to Oakley’s argument. She relies heavily on genetic-based brain disorders as the basis for four main “anti-social” behaviors as defined by the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), and relates these to specific areas of the brain that are malfunctioning (hence, the reason for the anti-social behavior). The presumption is that normal people don’t behave in an anti-social way and that’s why such behavior is characterized as a “disorder.” She then examines Stalin, Mao, Milosevic and others, along with her sister, Carolyn,*** in more than a bit of armchair psychology about how this works.

An alternative perspective is that Oakley is conflating different phenomena: genetic-based neurological disorders that create socially negative behaviors on the one hand and, on the other, an inborn predisposition to promote the interest of the self at the expense of others if that’s what it takes.**** The latter version of the “anti-social” individual may be a better description of the Machiavellian personality than the disorders she sees as defined by the DSM. She frequently describes this individual as “the successfully sinister,” which is an apt description for those who consistently put their interests ahead of the interests of others, and use deceit, manipulation, violence and power to achieve their ends. We see these individuals in everyday life and they stand in stark contrast to those who are other-regarding and altruistic.***** But from an evolutionary perspective, is this a disorder? These types of individuals may have these “anti-social” genes because they have worked so well in our evolutionary history. They advance the self at the expense of others. Oakley appears to suggest this herself when, in reference to another’s research, she writes “that psychopaths or Machiavellians can obtain long-term benefits by acting in me-first fashion that hurts others. In fact, the more sinister among us can reproduce and live quite nicely by taking advantage of others, thereby perpetuating any genes that might have played a role in their Machiavellian characteristics.”******

This stands in contrast to the other-regarding pole, which also leads to evolutionary success as the interest of these individuals is intimately tied to the interest of the group. This then sets up two poles within human nature (Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc. on one end, versus Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer on the other), with most of us falling someplace in between.


*Oakley is using the lay understanding of Machiavelli. Some political theorists would argue that Machiavelli’s real politick requires the use of “evil” behavior in order to achieve and protect a broader social good: public order.

**“A new field is that of systems biology, the ‘science of everything’ – everything living, at least. This new discipline looks at the piecemeal information that has been found related to genes and knits it together with other research to form a big picture describing how cells signal each other and how neurons interconnect. Ultimately, this helps us to understand how slight molecular and genetic differences can result in dramatic changes, not only in how a person looks, but in his or her temperament. This, then, is where we need to look to ultimately understand Machiavellian – unscrupulous, self-serving, often deeply malign – behavior.”

***Her older sister, who had no problems using others, had polio when young and Oakley believes that this affected areas of Carolyn’s brain to explain, in some degree, her anti-social behavior.

****More specifically, Oakley equates psychopaths with Machiavellians, whereas there might be a fundamental difference. To be fair to Oakley, she concedes there’s a continuum of underlying disorders when she writes that “psychopaths, borderlines, Machiavellians, and the ‘successfully sinister’ are often alluded to in virtually synonymous fashion. To some, this may seem an unfair blurring of phenotypes. To clarify matters, it might help if you were to think of psychopaths and borderlines as extreme examples….”

Where she refers to Mao, Stalin and Milosovic as psychopaths, with specific neurological disorders (she states for example that Mao was afflicted with a serious mental illness), it could be that they are, rather, extreme versions of highly motivated, power-hungry (i.e., alpha) individuals. From an overall social welfare perspective, where the common good is valued, these individuals are fairly characterized as “disordered” but from the perspective of biological evolution, these individuals are highly successful and not disordered at all.

*****Oakley uses empathy in the strict, socially good, sense of feeling another’s pain. Others see a broader, and more sinister, capacity, i.e., to know how another is feeling, an ability to transport oneself into the head of another to know what they are seeing and feeling. In this sense, it is quite similar to Oakley’s argument that the Machiavellian personality is able to take advantage of one’s altruistic traits and use others to his (or her) advantage. She writes, for example, that “psychopaths and Machiavellians have found their evolutionary niche in taking advantage of the natural altruism of other humans. Such variation in human emotional outlook is bred into our very genes.”

******Along the same lines, Oakley writes that “highly successful Machiavellians appear to lurk in every human population. With their extraordinary ability to stack any deck in their favor, their relentless need for control, and their self-serving ruthlessness, those with at least a modicum of talent, looks, and assertiveness are more likely to be found in positions of power….the larger the social structure and the bigger the payoff, the more Machiavellians eventually seem to find a way to creep to the top in numbers all out of proportion to their underlying percentage in society.”

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barbara Oakley's experiences with her ethically-challenged older sister inspired her curiosity about the 'Machiavellian' types in the world and what makes them act the way they do. She combines a few personal anecdotes with a broad-ranging look at recent research on sociopathy and borderline personality disorder. Overall, it's a thoughtful and compassionate consideration--as well as a warning--about difficult people whose lives sometimes intersect with ours. (And yeah, okay, I've diagnosed myself with pretty much every disorder in here.)

[Peter Moy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title of book, “Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend” describes its interwoven themes. This book being published six years ago so it has been around for a while. I read this book as it discusses in some detail the science behind the behaviour of the nasty people discussed in Robert Sutton’s recent “The Asshole Survival Guide”. ”. However, it is particularly relevant here in Australia with regard to the recent release of findings of the “Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse”. The same nasty people seem to have embedded themselves into our nation’s institutions.

The author’s interest in the subject came from impact of her badly behaved sister on her family life. She focuses on a particular subset of the personality types psychologists define as having “Antisocial Personality Disorder” who she labels as Hi-Machs. (High functioning Machiavellians.) It appears these people are highly intelligent. However, they lack many of the normal inhibitory functions such as conscience and empathy because of the structure of their brains. In particular, their drive to be in control is unrestrained. It come natural for them to use of a battery of devious self-centred tactics. If fact, psychologists studying these people admit to becoming fascinated by their behaviour.

One such tactic termed as “splitting’’ by psychologists. Here they play people off against each other. This behaviour will destroy any team. The following example comes from case notes cited in the book:

“[A] 26-year-old phlebotomist enters the patient's room to obtain the venous blood specimen for [a] test. After one futile attempt at venipuncture (made futile because the patient wrenched her arm away from the technician during the process), the patient demanded that the venipuncturist leave her room and requested that the head nurse for that floor see her. When the head nurse arrived, the patient complained about how inadequate her care was because an inexperienced venipuncturist was sent to draw her blood. The head nurse then called the senior phlebotomist, who came to see the patient.

The patient induced the senior phlebotomist to admit that her younger associate was inexperienced. The patient separately got the head nurse for the floor to admit that it was unprofessional for the senior phlebotomist to comment negatively about her junior associate. In the end, the patient never allowed the blood sample to be obtained. When asked by the attending physician why the blood was not sampled, the patient responded that there seemed to be discord among the staff, and they failed to remember to draw her blood.”

Hi-Machs with their uninhibited drive for control tend to rise to position of power in closed, dysfunctional and disrupted organisations. The author explores the behaviour of significant historical figures such as Slobodan Milosevic and Mao Zadong and provides the evidence that they were Hi-Machs. Needless to say pinning themselves to the coat tails of a Hi-Mach leaders generally does not end well for their followers.

The book assembles evidence that the genetics is the major factor for the defective structure of these people brains. Although in the case of the author’s sister, brain damage caused by the polio virus also contributed. The consequence of this fact is that being nice to these people will not change their behaviour. They will never have some road to Damascus experience and turn into a saint. The author points out that modern neural plasticity based treatments such as “cognitive behaviour therapy” has the possibility effectively compensating for the defective brain structures. However, the subject has got to want to change for these treatments to work. This co-operation is highly unlikely in the case on Hi-Machs.

The book is not a particularly easy read but the material covered is comprehensive and fascinating. The main reason for difficult reading is the confusion in the psychology literature on this subject. Psychologist seems to have a lot trouble coming to terms with the fact that diagnoses such as “antisocial personality disorder” and “borderline personality disorder” exist at all. ”. Psychologists seem to have been largely unaware of the existence of these people and as a result Hi-Machs and their like may have polluted the results of many classic psychological experiments. For example, the author suggests the classic “Stanford Prison Experiment” may have been biased by fact Hi-Macs would have been attracted by the advertisements placed for volunteers and would have easily outwitted the tests that were supposed to determine they were “normal”.

The good news is that there are not that many of the these people around. The author suggests a figure of one or two per hundred of the population. Awareness and avoidance is the best policy in dealing with these people. Reading this book will equip you with the knowledge to be aware of what to look for when you encounter a Hi-Mac. I suggest that reading Robert Sutton’s recent “The Asshole Survival Guide” will give you the means to avoid them.

[Someone You Might Know · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have a different perspective on this book because I was misdiagnosed with BPD many years ago.

I was abused by my immediate family. I could not bear to tell a lie, did not hold a grudge, had never experienced jealously, just wanted to get away.

It was only in early adulthood I felt rage towards those who had sexually abused me and subsequent people I met who invalidated my experiences of being sexually abused.

A systematic failure from one organisation to another resulted in a misanthropic worldview. I have a hightened sense of empathy for others.

I was misdiagnosed with BPD for four years before it was found to have been a misdiagnosis and ought to have been CPTSD.

Consider the circumstances in which the person is diagnosed. Is it by an inexperienced clinician they'd never met before after one brief chat? That's how I scooped this label. Yet I have it for life. I'd like to add there is no test to confirm whether or not anyone has BPD. There's no MRI scan, no x-ray, no chemical test. It's just someone's opinion. The disorder only exists because it was voted into existence by a committee, sponsored by pharmacutical companies. There's no science involved in actually proving this is a real condition.

Someone else will have a different opinion to whoever diagnosed you.

You can tell me I'm evil but I am the victim of evil people abusing me as a child and refuse to carry the sins of my parents so to speak. I have done nothing wrong. So you can keep talking but I won't be a scapegoat.

Compared to my other family members and a lot of people who are not being demonised here, I'm a saint. This book is victim blaming at it's finest.

People who want to think we are evil will read literature which supports this narrative.

Some people who get diagnosed with BPD are vile. Some other people who get diagnosed with BPD are kind but unstable because they're traumatised and they just want a quiet life and ultimately that is the life they will pursue no matter how many books are written slandering them.

[Joanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't remember what prompted me to buy this book, but I grabbed it off the shelf a few days ago to read. The author has worked as a Russian translator on Soviet trawlers, served as a radio operator at the South Pole, served in the U.S. Army and teaches bioengineering at Oakland University. She examines the science behind evil and mental illness, and the results are mind-boggling. I learned all sorts of new terms like malignant narcissism, successfully sinister, emote control, and gaslighting, which is a form of psychological abuse that involves denying facts. The author's analysis of the actions of world leaders like Chairman Mao, Adolf Hitler, and Slobodan Milosevic within the context of borderline personality disorder and anti-social psychopathy was riveting. What really blew my mind, however, was the revelation of students that seemed to show genetic links for some of these disorders. For example, anti-social personality disorder is presumed to be on the low rung of the scale of disorders, and psychopaths are identified as an especially troubled portion of the anti-social group. In a huge study of fraternal twins, there was an environment link to anti-social personality disorder, but no significant genetic link. With regard to the psychopatic sub-set, however, the study found that there was an 81% genetic link for psychopathy. Anyway, there are strong science and medical elements of the book, but I still recommend it.

[Richard Houchin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fun book full of anecdotes and psychological musings that can fuel good conversations or quiet considerations. I particularly appreciated the chapter on Milosevic, as before now I hadn't read much on the Yugoslavia genocide he perpetrated. There's a quote from a judge who oversaw the warcrime trials of Slobodan Milosevic. A victim described the gruesome torture and mass murder and the judge said, "I don't believe you. I don't mean to say I think you are lying, I mean that I literally cannot believe this happened."

That literal inability of a normal human to actually believe what psychopaths do is an important part of understanding how psychopaths can get away with it. In all things, we see what we expect to see and if our personal filters don't allow for certain things, it can be extremely difficult to recognize them and even hard to defend against them.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This had so much potential, but I feel there were many flaws in the book. It's basically a recreated case history of the psychological disorders of various despots. It was interesting to read about different dictators and their personality traits.

[Moishy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Random thoughts combined with some uneducated opinions.

[DeAnna Knippling · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the creator of the popular online class Learning How to Learn, a book combining current neurological research with personal insights about Machiavellianism and other dark personality traits.

The first two thirds of this book was great as the author lays down research, history, and personal narrative. The last part of the book was weaker, as she pulled her conclusions together. Although it's understandable that there's not any real, clear answer to the questions about brain structure and dark behavior that she raises, I wanted a clearer resolution in the end, like where research might be headed, a summation of what we knew or didn't knew, or a theory on how this all might fit together. I think she did have a theory, but never spelled it out--it might have been that Borderline Personality Disorder was behind all dark behavior. It wasn't clear, and I'm not sure that would have been justified as a conclusion.

Nevertheless, an interesting read, recommended if you want to see more about how "evil genes" work.

[Mics]

Its so interesting reading this from the perspective where a lot of these concepts feel like common knowledge in the zeitgeist and a bit dated but in the age of therapy speak still so misunderstood and misused.

[Abby Stopka · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book slump continues.

[Roger Keays · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you've ever had to deal with somebody with a personality disorder you might, like me, develop a perverse sort of addiction to reading about them. You want to stop in order to preserve your better view of humankind, but seeing someone else navigate the the same incomprehensible swamp that swallowed you is just too fixating.

In Evil Genes, Barbara Oakley takes a look at what makes the world's greatest super-villains so destructive. One chapter each is dedicated to Mao, Milosevic, and of course, Hitler. But it isn't her revealing analysis of these dictators that makes Evil Genes worth reading. Rather, it is the story of her personal struggle to understand her sister, Carolyn, that really brings the book home. She reminds us of how you don't have to be a dictator to wreak havoc on other people's lives.

> "Those who haven't [dealt with the successfully sinister] often simply don't believe they exist. Those who *have* usually know instantly what I'm talking about."

> "The puzzle for everyone is how there could be people who can do bad--even horrendous--things to others without feeling guilt."

It was her experiences with Carolyn that took Oakley down the path that led to Evil Genes. She takes us through everything she learned along the way about the function and dysfunction of the brains of Machiavellian types. She discusses the genes and brain regions known to be involved and explains in detail how they function.

> "People with slight problems in their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex appear to act normally, however, they may draw bizarre and irrational conclusions."

> "A child needs the orbitofrontal cortex and related neurological features to have a feeling of compassion."

Throughout Evil Genes, Oakley regularly revisits the basic problem of defining and diagnosing personality disorders. Typically, everybody knows there is something wrong, but nobody can never be sure exactly what it is or even begin to imagine what is causing it.

> "Others, like Carolyn, show a more puzzling mix of both psychopathic and empathetic characteristics--her easy ability to lie, for example, was coupled with absolute adoration for her cats."

> "There was something captivating about her--something that allowed men, for a while at least, to think that she was the answer to their dreams."

> "It can be difficult to know whether a leader is cognitively disturbed or instead an avant-garde visionary who sees the truth others are missing."

Oakley also wonders if Machiavellian behaviour should be considered as a disorder at all. Machiavellian traits are often well rewarded in the modern world, and a small section of the book includes a discussion on viewing personality disorders as adaptations. I think this perspective is key to understanding their persistence in the human population.

> "Although people with borderline personality disorder can be apparently manipulative, they don't see their behavior as such. They're trying to meet their needs in the only way they know how."

> "Just as the cuckoo has found an evolutionary niche laying its eggs in the nests of other birds, psychopaths and Machiavellians have found their evolutionary niche in taking advantage of the natural altruism of other humans."

I don't know how much Evil Genes ultimately contributes to the unravelling of personality disorders, but I do feel it makes a difference by showing us that they are real and destructive. Machiavellians are experts at manipulation and dealing with them can distort your reality. A book like Evil Genes can help bring you safely back to the shared reality of more healthy people. As Oakley says in the book, our best defence against Machiavellians may be simply to know they exist.

> "Taking action against a Machiavellian is often a dangerous proposition, and no-one takes on such a task lightly."

> "A true borderline's knee-jerk response [to being told she has a personality disorder] would be: I don't have borderline personality disorder. YOU have borderline personality disorder."

Although there is a good deal of science in Evil Genes, I found that Oakley's personal story about her sister, who was most probably borderline, was what kept me interested in the book. You can study theory until your hair bleeds, but it's the real life examples that give the theory meaning.

All told, Evil Genes is an interesting mix of science and story that presents an extremely complex subject in a digestible form. I strongly recommend it to anybody who has (or has had) a Machiavellian in their life!

★★★★

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a pretty good book where the main takeaway idea is that there is no real line between "nature" and "nurture": our environment influences how our genetic code is expressed, by causing certain genes to be activated (or inactivated). The stories of famous people and the author's sister, explaining how their genetic proclivities are similar to others, are quite interesting. However, the discussions of which genes are involved in which behaviors or cognitive functions, and where the brain processes those things, is just too dry and not exceptionally useful to the lay reader.

I do find it ironic that the author talks about how many of our beliefs and decisions are made emotionally, not rationally, and then decides at the end that her sister's malevolent actions were not really her sister's fault when there's no clear evidence to decide that logically. In addition, the author doesn't seem to want to explore the ramifications of people being controlled by their genes.

[Mary MacKintosh]

The title explains the book fairly concisely. Oakley writes knowledgeably and documents all her content, but her writing style incorporates humor and stories of her own life which humanize the ideas she presents, so lay people like me are willing to continue to read through the discussions of alleles and amygdala and hippocampus. Her incorporations of example personalities such as Princess Diana, Paris Hilton and her mother, Genghis Khan, Chairman Mao and Stalin, Hitler, Milosevic add to the enjoyment. The inclusion of Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Andy Fastow brings an important caveat to the reader: personalities with Machiavellian tendencies can have a direct effect on us small folk. Watch out for evil tendencies in coworkers, colleagues, neighbors, relatives and acquaintances!

[Moi · Rating 3 out of 5]

a neuroscience-heavy and anecdote-rich study of the possible biological underpinnings to successfully sinister behavior. i admit my eyes glazed over in the segments detailing the physiological aspects of the author's argument, since i took biology so, SO very long ago. but the chapters devoted to sociopaths through history—including in the author's own family—were fascinating. quite possibly a psychologist, psychiatrist, or neurologist would rate the text much more highly. as it was, for me, the nearly impenetrable chapters weighted my review heavily.

[Dan Seitz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit unfocused, jumping from hard science to personal memoir to armchair political analysis, and Oakley's clear right-wing politics unfortunately begin to bleed in towards the end, leading to a missed opportunity. It would have been great to explore the grey areas she discusses by looking critically at her own heroes. As it is it's mildly distasteful to have an author praise Thatcher's "necessary" economic policies while alleging the American school system MUST have a high percentage of "Machiavellians."

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

One might be forgiven for assuming that the nature versus nurture argument had been quietly settled long ago, with the obvious winner being "both." But apparently that's not what most of us want to hear, as the continuing supply of sociobiology books championing the near-irrelevance of culture seems to show. On the human psychology front, the big names are Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate) and Judith Rich Harris (The Nurture Assumption), both of whom have now favorably blurbed a book by a new footsoldier, Barbara Oakley, a professor of electrical engineering at Oakland University. To the cause Oakley's book contributes, at the very least, a way of encapsulating human nature that everyone can understand. It's called Evil Genes.

Evil Genes is half personal anecdote, half survey of recent science on the biochemical underpinnings of mood and emotion (Oakley would go further, to say underpinnings of human behavior, but this is exactly the connection the studies do not show). Indeed there is some interesting science in Evil Genes, mostly in the areas of genomics, brain chemistry, and neural imaging. But when you extract what is pertinent to Oakley's case, you are left with very little. Certain genes, as we might expect, influence the production of certain neurotransmitters, and the growth of certain areas of the brain. There are studies that suggest that some genetic profiles can sufficiently impact mood, emotion and cognition to dispose a person to psychopathy. Evil Genes cites several such studies.

But here we need to be careful. Genomes are not blueprints. Complex organisms have a profound level of variation available in their genes. Some traits are, admittedly, highly determined by our genes--Mendel's famous wrinkled and smooth peas, for example, or our own eye and hair color. A handful of diseases, like Huntington's, are almost inevitable in those carrying the right genes, and in some cases the onset of these diseases can be predicted with considerable accuracy.

But these are misleading examples, and in the popular mind the deterministic aspect of genetic influence is given far more importance than is due. For a century, scientists have spoken of genes "for" various traits, though for at least half of that time we've known that gene activity is regulated by non-heritable factors, either in the "outside" environment, or within the cell. Though we still talk of programs, blueprints and "hard-wiring," genetic influences are much more similar to a library of possible texts. In short, genetic determinism, though so eminently compelling to our imaginations, is a scientific model that has outlived its usefulness.

Most genetic determinists give abundant lip service to the complexity of gene regulation in the cell, and to the important role of environments in expressing genetic tendencies. But when the time comes to put it all in everyday terms, these caveats are swept aside. Thus we have Richard Dawkins' oft-quoted comments about genes as "master programmers" exerting "ultimate power" over behavior. He knows, or should know, the falsity of this, but it helps sell books.

Oakley, too, is careful to emphasize that traits arise from interactions between genes and environments*. To this extent her book is a helpful contribution to our understanding of the genetics of human behavior. But this subtlety falls away where it matters most. We look to the title to distill for us the most important part of a book's argument. Evil Genes does little, unfortunately, to dispel the common misunderstanding of the genome as a deterministic program, and it's hard to see how this could be anything but deliberate.

(This is the same gambit, as I alluded to earlier, used by Jonah Goldberg in his book Liberal Fascism. Deep in the guts of his text he makes weird disclaimers to the effect of "just because I'm calling liberals 'fascists' doesn't mean they're always diabolical; in fact liberal fascism is often quite benign." That's a supreme act of bad faith, and a pretty big insult to all the people who suffered at the hands of real, non-benign fascism last century.)

Titles matter, because we need to connect even the most complicated explanations of things to basic understandable ideas. In the case of Evil Genes the idea is an old one; it's the myth of the "bad seed," the notion that evil is born, not made. The mark of Cain. There's another, less explicit myth in there too, the myth of the Svengali, wherein evil always manages to get the better of good, through trickery and exploitation. Evil, in this tale, is endowed with a powerful inner magnetism which Goodness does not have the resources to resist.

There's a certain value to these stories, but it's not the one that Oakley seizes upon. The lesson of these cautionary archetypes is not about the Evil Other, it is about ourselves. It is about the tension between, in Blake's proposition, Innocence and Experience. The primary confusion running through Evil Genes is Oakley's implicit association of "good" with "innocent." She is trying to combat the naive misconception that people are born good. But is this really all that widely held? It seems to me the much more prevalent conception is that humans are born innocent, which is not at all the same. Ironically, the conflation of innocence and goodness falls prey to the same naiveté Oakley sets out to remediate: to identify innocence with goodness is itself innocent. To the extent we can talk about good and evil in any meaningful way, they must be informed by our experience.

A newborn baby can do neither good nor evil. He or she is utterly self absorbed, by nature, in a way that is entirely beyond reproach. We allocate proportionally more responsibility to children as they develop, until we release them as free agents into the world, at around 18. But this is not a process of reactively doling out greater and greater hunks of adulthood until the child's development it complete. It is an interactive and creative venture. These 18 years are set aside, in our culture, not just to wait for development to be completed, but to build a psyche, an identity (as opposed to a personality, which we can be more comfortable calling "inborn") that can function in a healthy way. And we spend an enormous amount of energy and money on this process, through rearing, schooling, media, and various other organized activities. A visitor from another planet would have to conclude that we consider that enculturation of children a pretty important activity.

Oakley's book completely ignores the function of culture and socialization in the development process. The extent of her interest in the social aspect of psychology is expressed in a single sentence:

"Psychology, with explanations founded on "defense mechanisms," "countertransference" and "acting out" can only go so far."

We are not told how far is "so far," nor are we treated to any explication of the merits (or demerits) of the psychological paradigm. She unnecessarily dismisses the behaviorist "blank slate" model of human nature, which has been out of favor in clinical psychology for half a century. Again, it is an irony Oakley fails to recognize that without the important work the behaviorists did eliminating conceptual structures as a legitimate course of psychological study, the mechanistic view of humanity she favors, along with luminaries like Steven Pinker and Judith Rich Harris, would not be possible.

I mentioned earlier that the book is half personal narrative, focusing mostly on Oakley's effort to understand her sister, Carolyn, who she calls a "Machiavellian" personality type, after the classification developed by Christie and Geis in the 1950s. On the one hand the fact that Oakley has written her personal motivation for pursuing this interest right into the through line of her book is an admirable transparency. But making the venture explicitly personal demonstrates a conflict of interest that deeply mars Oakley's argument. Though she briefly touches upon some of the recent challenges in the literature, such as identical twin studies, to prevailing nurture-based theories of psychology, when it comes to her own family the topic is (understandably) off limits. By failing to seriously investigate (or even consider) the possibility that Carolyn (who died in 2004) might have suffered some kind of transgressional event in her childhood, Oakley obviates her sister's history of any illuminatory potential. Excerpts from Carolyn's diary throughout the book give the appearance of contributing, somehow, to Oakley's evil genes thesis. But from the start, Carolyn is presumed to have, a priori, "Machiavellian"** genes. So it is unclear how this personal history contributes to Oakley's argument, except perhaps to make it appear more sympathetic.

Whatever happened or didn't happen to Oakley's sister, most morally and emotionally damaged people have a history of childhood abuse. The pattern is demonstrable. It's possible that some people are born with a more robust genome, and able to thrive after an upbringing that would have twisted the psyche of many another into Gordian knots. It's not clear to me why we should call the latter a genetic defect instead of calling the former a genetic cushion. In either case, most children raised in healthy homes don't end up "sinister." As a culture, we are able to profoundly influence the nurture side of the equation. Why not focus on what is possible, instead encouraging the kind of fatalism that extends from considering human nature as set in stone, out of our hands? Why devote large portions of our discourse to the things we can't have any influence on? At the very least, scary bedtime stories about monsters go down a lot easier (and result in much better dreams) when the hero or heroine is given something interesting or useful to do.