At this very moment, there are humans flying above our heads, stuffed into airplanes like tennis balls in a can, sitting peacefully among strangers for hours on end.

It's remarkable that apes could achieve such a thing.

I refer not to the technical achievement of flight, but the temperamental achievement, of peace

and confinement with strangers. The anthropologist Sarah Hurdy once imagined the catastrophe of

attempting the same with a pack of our cousins, the chimpanzees. Quote, any one of us would be

lucky to disembark with all ten fingers and

toes still attached, with the babies still breathing and unmaimed. Bloody earlobes and other appendages

would litter the aisles. End quote. Given that we have every reason to believe our ancestors

were chimp-like, through and through,

it seems like our species has really improved our disposition in the interim.

But then again, as Dale Peterson points out, a chimpanzee wouldn't deliberately try to bomb the plane either.

Dr. Richard Rangham's book, The Goodness Paradox,

notes the juxtaposition between these two true observations

and reconciles them impressively.

Our species lacks the reactive aggression,

the impulsive and spontaneous violence of the chimp world,

and yet we retain proactive aggression in a form of cold, calculated, deliberate violence.

It is profoundly mysterious that our species is so much more affable and docile and cooperative

than our chimpanzee cousins, and yet we somehow happily carry out deliberate, planned acts of

violence that make the chimpanzee's worst demons look like angels.

This behavioral imbalance is one of the great unsolved puzzles of our species.

Today, I had the pleasure of speaking to the man who may well have put the pieces together.

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