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A TALENT FOR FRIENDSHIP: Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait. By John Edward Terrell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. ix, 302 pp. (Figures.) US$29.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-938645-1.
The inherent social nature of human beings is no longer disputed and no biologist or anthropologist would subscribe to a view of our human ancestors as isolated individuals wandering pristine forests in search of food and mates, ready to fight off competitors for either. But many sociobiologists, such as E.O. Wilson, and evolutionary psychologists, such as Stephen Pinker, would still maintain that the group as a basic social unit is competitive, bellicose, and murderous. Indeed, the idea of competition as the driving force in human evolution has required conviction that those in each generation who survive to transmit their genes are fit enough to resort to violence to do so.
The emphasis on competition has a number of depressing concomitants. It is masculinist; it presents individualism as a virtue; and it represents altruism as self-interest and those who are selfish as the victors in the evolutionary struggle. John Terrell proposes an alternative view of human nature as a determinant of successful evolution. While acknowledging that no single set of qualities provides a template for what might be called Human Nature, he argues that the...