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59
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
41/100Critics
44/100Scholars
93/100Author:
Nichola Raihani
Publisher:
St. Martin's Press
Date:
August 31, 2021
A biologist by training, Raihani looks at where and how collaborative behavior emerges throughout the animal kingdom, and what problems it solves. She reveals that the species that exhibit cooperative behavior-teaching, helping, grooming, and self-sacrifice-most similar to our own tend not to be other apes; they are birds, insects, and fish, occupying far more distant branches of the evolutionary tree. By understanding the problems they face, and how they cooperate to solve them, we can glimpse how human cooperation first evolved. And we can also understand what it is about the way we cooperate that has made humans so distinctive-and so successful.
What The Reviewers Say
[Raihani's] rewarding analysis ranges from genetics to politics, and from the individual to the international, including the COVID-19 pandemic..
[Raihani] starts at the simplest level. Humans do not take centre stage until halfway through, after a long look at the roots of co-operation between 'selfish' genes, in cells, then multicellular organisms, and groups of organisms.
The book starts promisingly enough, with Raihani gathering weird and wonderful examples of the “social instinct” among humans and our fellow creatures.
Raihani, a professor of evolution and behavior at University College London, debuts with an upbeat take on why humans help each other.
