Simone Barbera

“Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That’s not generic prosociality. That’s ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words, the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context—who you are, your environment, and who that person is. As we will see in chapter 8, the same applies to the regulation of genes relevant to these neuropeptides.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Across the broad sweep of human history, societies either were governed autocratically by someone who disposed of a state bureaucracy or had something resembling early democracy where the state was absent, power was decentralized, and their overall size was likely to be small. The idea that one could sustain a democracy in a polity as large as the thirteen American colonies, combined with a central state, was unprecedented”
― David Stasavage, The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today

“members of the revolutionary battalions – those who fought on the frontline – were more likely to choose their comrades. They felt more fused with their fellow fighters than with their own flesh and blood.”
― Harvey Whitehouse, Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World

“Some groups inevitably suffered more fitness-reducing events – experiences that negatively impacted their ability to survive and pass on their genes. And these were the groups that ended up being more cooperative than those that suffered less. What’s more, these positive effects on cooperativeness were stronger when shared suffering resulted from intergroup conflict than from natural disaster. In short, doing badly made the group pull together more tightly.”
― Harvey Whitehouse, Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World