The Book

Below is a listing of chapters. For a more detailed look at the content, check out Amazon's Look Inside feature and the Chapters Overview Video

  • Chapter 1: The Journey We Will Take
  • Chapter 2: We know what life is - a special case of chemistry
  • Chapter 3: The only way to win is not to play - the problem with cooperation between organisms
  • Chapter 4: The facts of life – reproduction and kin-selected behavior in humans
  • Chapter 5: Death from a distance – the evolutionary logic of kinship-independent social cooperation
  • Chapter 6: It takes a village to raise a human child
  • Chapter 7: Throwing strikes on the village commons – the planet’s first remote killer and first kinship-independent social cooperator
  • Chapter 8: Promiscuity and monogamy – sex and family life in the uniquely human village
  • Chapter 9: Voices from the past: The evolution of 'language'
  • Chapter 10: Wisdom of Crowds – Implications of uniquely human information sharing
  • Chapter 11: The human mastery of Earth begins – The behaviorally modern human revolution and the first information economy
  • Chapter 12: Neolithic and “agricultural” revolutions – Humans “settle down”
  • Chapter 13: Elite body armor: Hierarchical coercive power and the archaic state
  • Chapter 14: Modernity emerges from the barrel of a gun, Part 1 – artillery stabilizes the hierarchical state
  • Chapter 15: Modernity emerges from the barrel of a gun, Part 2 – handguns democratize the modern state
  • Chapter 16: The pan-human population takes full ownership of planet Earth – aircraft, nuclear explosives and the emergence of the pan-global human village
  • Chapter 17: Final considerations -A humane future from our evolutionary past

© 2009 All Rights Reserved Paul M. Bingham & Joanne Souza

Conclusions discussed on this site are SOLELY those of the authors, Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza, and may not be endorsed by any others quoted on the site.