Quotes from Richard W. Wrangham

Human competitiveness still has elements of the primate system of achieving status by individual combat.

High-testosterone men are not particularly aggressive unless challenged, but when confronted they are likely than low-testosterone men to respond with aggression.

Many tendencies that we regard as morally reprehensible clearly evolved, including numerous kinds of sexual coercion, lethal violence, and social domination. Equally, many morally delightful tendencies did not evolve, such as charity to strangers and kindness to animals.

The evidence that Homo sapiens have been self-domesticating for three hundred thousand years, and how it happened, suggests that we are a thoroughly unusual primate.

The moral sense was once explained purely by religion. Now an evolutionary account is needed.

People often expect religious believers to act in especially prosocial ways, which they often do, but religiosity is not always a predictor or moral kindness.

Coalitionary proactive aggression in humans, therefore, is most simply understood as an elaboration of ancient tendencies.

However, being moral can include not only acts of kindness but also deeds of conformity and violence.

We know that over time society sometimes improves in quality, and sometimes decays. What we cannot know is which direction our descendants will take.

where coercive alliances regulate societal rules, conflicts between the interests of men and women consistently end in men's favor. Patriarchy in this sense is currently a human universal.

Every society has to find its own protection. To avert episodes of violence we should constantly remind ourselves of how easily a complex social organization can decay, and how hard it is to construct.

The important human quest should not be to promote cooperation. That goal is relatively simple and firmly founded on our self-domestication and moral senses. The harder challenge is reducing our capacity for organized violence.

The problem in both human and ape history is that political power is built on physical power - and physical power is ultimately the power of violence or its threat.

The moral contradictions of our ancestry should not prevent us from reaching a realistic assessment of who we are. When we do that, high hopes are still possible.

An animal slaughtered without being stressed retains more glycogen in its muscles. After death the glycogen converts to lactic acid, which promotes denaturation and therefore a more tender meat.

Recent studies of the digestion of eggs are starting to resolve the argument, showing for the first time that cooked protein is digested much more completely than raw protein.

The amino acids of chicken eggs come in about forty proteins in almost exactly the proportions humans require. The match gives eggs a higher biological value—a measure of the rate at which the protein in food supports growth—than the protein of any other known food, even milk, meat, or soybeans. Raw eggs have other natural advantages. Their shells make them safer from bacterial contamination than cuts of meat.

Assessing the energy value of foods is a difficult technical problem. Nutritionists cannot calculate the value of foods directly because foods are too complicated in their composition and structure, and digestive systems treat different foods in different ways. So instead of making precise calculations of exactly the number of calories people can obtain from a given food, nutritionists make rough guesses.

The only way to find out whether sexual selection has shaped human males for aggression is to leave the theory and go back to the evidence. There are two places to look for an answer. We can look at our bodies, and we can think about our minds. The easier part is our bodies.

Animal behavior is not purely emotional. Nor is human decision-making purely rational.

our essential process for making a decision still relies on emotion.

Pride, ideology, or belief restrains many people from viewing Homo Sapiens as just another primate species, one among many.

The control of fire and the practice of cooking are human universals.

Cooking was a great discovery not merely because it gave us better food, or even because it made us physically human. It did something even more important: it helped make our brains uniquely large, providing a dull human body with a brilliant human mind.