I’m up on Wintergreen mountain for the weekend–about the only time I can leisurely read The New Yorker–which I still believe has some of the best writing around. Jared Diamond’s latest anthropological piece about vengeance among New Guinea Highlanders makes for some powerful reading. He concludes that:
We regularly ignore the fact that the thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. It ranks with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend.
My question is what is the evolutionary fitness argument for this human trait? How did the need for vengeance get selected for?
Read the entire article. It opens up some interesting questions for neuroscientists.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 