About this item
A powerful new theory of human nature suggests that our unique friendliness is the secret to our success as a species. For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened? Since Charles Darwin wrote about "evolutionary fitness," the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history.
About the Author
Brian Hare is the author of the New York Times Bestseller 'The Genius of Dogs'. He is the Director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center and a professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University.Brian received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and has published dozens of empirical articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals including Science, Current Biology, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His publications on dog cognition are among the most heavily cited papers on dog behavior and intelligence.Brian's research consistently received national and international media coverage over the last decade and has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, LA Times, the Economist, Discover Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Science Magazine (News) and Time Magazine. He has been a frequent guest on radio programs including NPR (All Things Considered, Science Friday, and Radio-Lab) and BBC Radio. He has also been featured in multiple documentaries from production companies such as NOVA (U.S.) , National Geographic (U.S.) , BBC (U.K.) , RTL (Germany) , SBS (Korea) and Globo- TV (Brazil) . In 2004 The German Federal Ministry of Research and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation named him a recipient of the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, Germany's most prestigious award for scientists under the age of 40. In 2007 Smithsonian Magazine named him one of the top 37 U.S. scientists under the age of 36.
