Day 105: Demonic Males (7/5/2008)

Ever since Jennifer had me read the The Lost: A Search for Six in Six Million a couple of years ago, I've become interested in the underlying motivation and capacity for human violence. This book attempts to use an evolutionary explanation for the origins of human violence by looking at our closest primate relatives - the chimpanzee and the bonobo. While I have read portions of this book previously as excerpts they always came off as being overly biologically deterministic. However, these passages just didn't really do the books justice. Overall, I found this book well written and in the end it had a good message about the power of understanding our evolutionary past to comprehend our present and determine our future.