Evil used to confuse me, but today, having studied human evolution for a good few years now,

good confuses me so much more. The political philosopher Hena Arendt coined the phrase,

the banality of evil, which is now a permanent fixture in the English lexicon. She was writing about how the people

who do the most evil things are often, quote, terrifyingly normal, end quote. But when I hear the

phrase, I actually think of something quite different. And because this phrase is misused so often,

I don't feel too bad misusing it myself here.

When I hear it, I think about how predictable evil is.

I think about how predictable it is that animals like us would hurt each other.

Think about this.

Animals, all of us, are born into a maximum stakes competition to survive and

reproduce, with no rules and no referees. Of course, things get brutal. What else would you expect?

If you look to nature, you see that other animals do almost all the things you might consider evil, and they're doing them all of the time.

Animals assault each other, viciously and regularly. They steal from each other, they kill each other,

they kill each other's babies deliberately, they wage war from each other, they kill each other, they kill each other's

babies deliberately, they wage war on each other, they, well, many kids listen to this show, so I won't

explicitly mention some of the worst things animals do, but if you're old enough to hear what I would

say, you really don't need me to say it, do you?

As a teenager, I didn't understand why humans hurt one another,

and in my confusion, I fell back on the vague, incorrect notion that all evil behavior stems from some great socially constructed mistake or another.

Humans are naturally very good animals, I thought.

Society just messes them up, right? Well, sometimes. There's some truth to this idea.

Great many evils are caused by quirks of culture, and culture interfaces with our natural behavior

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