Survival of the Friendliest
Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity[1] is a book by anthropologist Brian Hare and writer Vanessa Woods, first published in 2020, based on Hare's research hypothesis of human self-domestication.[2] The main thesis of the book is that late in human evolution Homo sapiens underwent a process of extreme selection for friendliness that led to the self-domestication syndrome, as seen in other animals. The self-domestication syndrome led to a series of cognitive changes that allowed modern humans to out compete other species of humans in the Pleistocene, including Neanderthals, and become the most successful mammal on the planet. Hare and Woods argue that self-domestication is an ongoing process that continues today.
Author
Abbey Lossing (illustration)
Greg Mollica (design)
English
July 14, 2020
United States
Print (hardcover)
304
155.7
BF698.95 H37 2020
Reception[edit]
Survival of the Friendliest was well covered in the press,[9][10][11][12] but there were popular and academic critiques.
Carel Van Shaik wrote: 'A lack of empirical studies on evolutionary rates and variation thwarts meaningful comparison with domestication.'[13]
Legal scholar Cass Sunstein wrote: 'Hare and Woods make it plausible to think that an underlying propensity of Homo Sapiens—to divide the world into insiders and outsiders—is causing a great deal of contemporary turmoil. But the underlying mechanisms are numerous, and evolutionary explanations are hardly sufficient. In the United States, for example, party antagonisms are much greater now than they were forty years ago; Homo Sapiens has not changed much in that time',[14] although later in the review Sunstein conceded: 'Homo Sapiens triumphed because of our capacity to cooperate with one another. In a challenging time, that is an inspiring message—and it suggests, in the strongest possible terms, that this is a capacity to cultivate.'[14]
Conservative commenters such as Pat Gray have criticized 'their theory they are altering now to fit their sensibilities, and their cry closets'.[15]