Why We Hate

An insightful and probing exploration of the contradiction between humans' enormous capacity for hatred and their evolutionary development as a social species Why We Hate tackles a pressing issue of both longstanding interest and fresh relevance: why a social species like Homo sapiens should nevertheless be so hateful to itself. We go to war and are prejudiced against our fellow human beings. We discriminate on the basis of nationality, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and gender. Why are humans at once so social and so hateful to each other? In this book, prominent philosopher Michael Ruse looks at scientific understandings of human hatred, particularly Darwinian evolutionary theory. He finds the secret to this paradox in our tribal evolutionary past, when we moved ten thousand years ago from being hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists—a shift that paved the way for modern civilization. Simply put, as Ruse paraphrases, "our modern skulls house…