{"id":18,"date":"2007-07-08T19:03:07","date_gmt":"2007-07-09T00:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/?p=18"},"modified":"2009-04-07T05:46:35","modified_gmt":"2009-04-07T12:46:35","slug":"the-origins-of-virtue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/?p=18","title":{"rendered":"The Origins of Virtue"},"content":{"rendered":"

At TAM5, in response to a question to a panel of speakers regarding their suggested reading list for us right now, Christopher Hitchens recommended Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation<\/u><\/a>. Hitchens said it was a good book about how humans came to have a moral sense derived from nature and not from a supernatural being.<\/p>\n

In a short 265 pages, Ridley covers a lot of ground in a very readable way. He approaches the evolution of virtue from the genetic level, through animal behavior, on to mankind’s early societies and today’s world. Along the way, the reader gets a survey of related game theory, the gene selection v. group selection battle, some fun debunking of cultural myths and a high-level refresher on the great thinkers in evolutionary biology and related economics.<\/p>\n

Ridley’s style is easy to read and the vocabulary is accessible (until the last twenty pages, oddly). I did tire of one device he used: explaining something for several paragraphs as if it were true, then explaining that it’s not true because of reason X. After the first few times, it stopped being fun. When I read him again (his next title for me is Genome<\/u><\/a>, sometime next year when my copy and I are in the same country again), I’ll be wary of this trick.<\/p>\n

I was predisposed to Ridley’s premise (evolutionary biology explains a lot of things) and goal (describing a way to understand how humans evolved into having morals), and I still learned a great amount from the book and I have a much better logical understanding of the subject now. I am also a bit more loving and suspicious of everyone!<\/p>\n

The book was good. I am glad Mr. Hitchens recommended it.<\/code><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At TAM5, in response to a question to a panel of speakers regarding their suggested reading list for us right now, Christopher Hitchens recommended Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation. Hitchens said it was a good book about how humans came to have a moral sense derived from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[8,21],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":209,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions\/209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}