
The Goodness Paradox
The Strange Relationship Between Peace and Violence in Human Evolution
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Narrated by:
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Michael Page
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By:
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Richard Wrangham
About this listen
Throughout history, even as daily life has exhibited calm and tolerance, war has never been far away, and even within societies, violence can be a threat. The Goodness Paradox gives a new and powerful argument for how and why this uncanny combination of peacefulness and violence crystallized after our ancestors acquired language in Africa a quarter of a million years ago.
Words allowed the sharing of intentions that enabled men effectively to coordinate their actions. Verbal conspiracies paved the way for planned conflicts and, most importantly, for the uniquely human act of capital punishment. The victims of capital punishment tended to be aggressive men, and as their genes waned, our ancestors became tamer. This ancient form of systemic violence was critical not only encouraging cooperation in peace and war and in culture but also for making us who we are: Homo sapiens.
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- Unabridged
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In industry after industry, data, analytics, and AI-driven processes are transforming the nature of work. While we often still treat AI as the domain of a specific skill, business function, or sector, we have entered a new era in which AI is challenging the very concept of the firm. AI-centric organizations exhibit a new operating architecture, redefining how they create, capture, share, and deliver value.
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Good writing but disappointing reading
- By YBNRML on 04-13-20
By: Marco Iansiti, and others
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Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
- By: Richard Hofstadter
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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This book throws light on many features of the American character. Its concern is not merely to portray the scorners of intellect in American life, but to say something about what the intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a democratic society.
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Fifty years later, still valid today
- By David Evan Glasser on 11-13-18
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Factfulness
- Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
- By: Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Ola Rosling
- Narrated by: Richard Harries
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of carrying only opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends - what percentage of the world's population live in poverty; why the world's population is increasing; how many girls finish school - we systematically get the answers wrong. In Factfulness, professor of international health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two longtime collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens.
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Great Read not for Listening
- By carlos gomez on 06-01-18
By: Hans Rosling, and others
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The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution: 1763-1789
- By: Robert Middlekauff
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 26 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The first book to appear in the illustrious Oxford History of the United States, this critically-acclaimed volume - a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - offers an unsurpassed history of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the American republic.
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Strong History Rich With Behind The Scenes Details
- By John on 10-06-11
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These Truths
- A History of the United States
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Jill Lepore
- Length: 29 hrs
- Unabridged
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In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. In riveting prose, These Truths tells the story of America, beginning in 1492, to ask whether the course of events has proven the nation's founding truths or belied them.
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Good Story but distracting sound engineering
- By MindSpiker on 11-21-18
By: Jill Lepore
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The Undoing Project
- A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
- By: Michael Lewis
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Forty years ago Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred systematically when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made Michael Lewis' work possible.
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Behind the scenes of amazing science
- By Neuron on 10-16-17
By: Michael Lewis
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The Hour Between Dog and Wolf
- Risk Taking, Gut Feelings, and the Biology of Boom and Bust
- By: John Coates
- Narrated by: Richard Powers
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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A successful Wall Street trader turned Cambridge neuroscientist reveals the biology of boom and bust and how risk taking transforms our body chemistry, driving us to extremes of euphoria and risky behavior or stress and depression. The laws of financial boom and bust, it turns out, have more than a little to do with male hormones. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Dr. John Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success that dramatically lowers the fear of risk.
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Amazing!
- By Gary C on 03-12-15
By: John Coates
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In Ascension
- By: Martin MacInnes
- Narrated by: Freya Miller
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms—what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.
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Unexpected story
- By Steve Mowe on 03-10-25
By: Martin MacInnes
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The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory
- American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism
- By: Tim Alberta
- Narrated by: Tim Alberta
- Length: 18 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing—and least understood—people living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints an expansive and profoundly troubling portrait of the American evangelical movement.
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Looked forward to this a long time and wasn’t disappointed!
- By Josh Hulbert on 12-08-23
By: Tim Alberta
What listeners say about The Goodness Paradox
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Midwest Grandpa
- 05-17-19
Important! Fascinating. Narrated wonderfully.
Wrangham does not disappoint. He leads us to creatively face the possibility that we, humanity, could disappoint, could cause our own extinction; but we need not. Evolved human nature, evolved biology, evolved psychology, are not necessarily destiny. Ideally read alongside Jerod Diamond's 2019 book, Upheaval.
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- Anonymous User
- 12-07-23
A fascinating exploration of the complex ramifications of a brutally simple premise
This book is yet another example of Richard Wrangham’s remarkable talent for explaining in clear lucid prose the myriad downstream effects of one turn in our developmental history. Highly recommended.
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- hans sandberg
- 01-11-20
A deep exploration into the origins of us
Richard Wrangham digs deep and far back into human prehistory and history, and puts forward an extremely interesting explanation of why humans and human societies are the way they are.
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- Jonathan
- 12-29-22
Brilliant
I recently read Catching Fire and immediately jumped into this one. I feel much more at peace with humanity after reading these two great works. Thank you, Richard Wrangham, for sharing this work!
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- Orson Scott Card
- 07-26-22
wise new views about why we're nice and why we're
wrangham takes us through key issues in human evolution, dealing with motivations for violence and how our cultural resistance to it can lead to paradoxical results. it's even possible that we have evolved to have leaders who have been genetically influenced by previous outcomes.
this is going to require considerable thinking, but thanks to this book, we have a lot more data to support our thinking about who we are and where we're going.
Michael Page's reading is superb, with utter clarity plus an ear for how to interpret what is said.
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- Maggie
- 07-01-23
Fascinating
This reader annoyed me a little, frequently readin too fast for my tastes, but the content is exceptionally good
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- Melanie Virtue
- 05-05-19
Great book but maybe less suited to an audiobook
As a student of human evolution, I found this book fascinating. The basic premise is that humans have domesticated themselves over the last 300,000 years or so, reducing our reactive aggression (losing one's temper), while increasing our proactive aggression (planning a raid), something which was greatly enhanced by the advent of language. He makes a stark comparison between humans and chimpanzees - if you put 300 chimps in a plane, you'd have many dead at the end of their journey, while humans are capable of sitting calmly next to strangers for hours.
The subject is complex and the points are well argued. I don't think it was quite as easy a read as his earlier book Catching Fire, or Demonic Males, but equally intriguing.
Even just reading about the process of domestication in other species, like foxes, was interesting. It creates unintended side effects such as white patches on one's extremities (white socks on horses, cows etc) and floppy ears (many dogs, rabbits). I found myself disappointed that if we humans are indeed (self) domesticated, then why don't we humans have either?
Having listened to the audiobook I found myself wishing I'd bought the paper version. Either the narrator was too fast, or the topic is too dense to just listen to once and fully grasp. I kept wanting to rewind.
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- Tom Donahue
- 02-07-23
A fascinating trip into the weeds
The last chapter summarizes the book in a clear, precise way. If you’re really interested, listen to the entire book. Some sentences are so long and convoluted they don’t give themselves well to an audiobook, yet they state important principles.
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-29-22
Incomplete
This is a great book!!! However, unlike any books I’ve been able to download prior to and after this book, accessibility to the last few chapters have been impossible. Audible may be responsible for this inconvenience. Please fix it Audible so I can finish listening to it.
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