Description
A hawk passed over the fox pens outside Novosibirsk and dropped a single wing feather, and every animal in the enclosure ran to stare at it: the foxes bred across forty-four years to seek out human company, and the control foxes bred at random, alike. Brian Hare had been stuck for weeks. To test whether friendliness had also changed the way foxes read a human gesture, he needed something both groups wanted equally, and Siberian foxes are indifferent to what a graduate student keeps in his bag. The sky supplied it. He came back the next morning with a feather in his pocket, and the experiment ran.
Survival of the Friendliest argues that Homo sapiens outlasted at least four other human species, several with brains the size of ours or larger, not because we grew cleverer but because we were selected for tolerance of strangers. Hare and Vanessa Woods call this self-domestication, and their strongest move is to insist that it left a body behind. Across the Late Pleistocene, brow ridges receded by roughly 40 per cent, faces shortened, skulls rounded into the globular shape no other human had. Dogs arrived at the same place by scavenging around our camps until fear gave way to attraction. Bonobos arrived there on the far side of the Congo River, with no help from us at all.
Then comes the reversal that gives the book its reason for existing. The machinery that lets us treat an unmet stranger as kin also allows us to shut that recognition off; when we sense our group is threatened, the brain’s theory of mind network quietens, and the people it stops registering become available for anything. Prejudice is the wrong word for this, the authors say. What they describe is a temporary blindness, and every human brain can produce it.
In the acknowledgements, Hare and Woods explain that a draft was finished in October 2016 and that they discarded half or more of it after the American election, then spent two further years reading social psychology and political science so the book could offer remedies. Those remedies arrive in the register of medicine. The disease has been identified; so has the treatment. “The good news is that the vaccine exists, and we know it works.”
The vaccine is contact. The evidence assembled for it is better than that word suggests, which turns out to be the difficulty. When Samuel and Pearl Oliner worked through the testimony of hundreds of people who hid Jews during the Holocaust, searching for what the rescuers shared, they came back with one thing: each had been close to a Jewish neighbour, friend or colleague before the war. “It was because they had once, or still, loved someone who was Jewish.” Andrzej had a Jewish stepmother. Ernst had grown up with Jewish playmates. This is a finding about immunity conferred in advance. Vaccines are prophylactic. They are given to the well.
The book then asks contact to work as treatment. Its counterargument is real and I want to give it room: Gordon Hodson’s work suggests that repeated contact moves the most intolerant people furthest, until they resemble the most tolerant in the sample. Fine. But look at the conditions. Contact defuses hostility only in low-anxiety settings, which is the authors’ own stipulation, and the trigger for dehumanisation is perceived threat. The intervention requires the absence of the thing it treats. Every case that works in these chapters had someone forcing proximity: an army integrating for the Battle of the Bulge, a housing shortage in the 1940s, a university assigning roommates, a desegregation order. Compulsion is doing much of the work, and the book never says so.
Nor does it linger where it should. A survey from 2000 found that 86 per cent of white Americans knew a black person, and that 1.5 per cent named a good friend who was black. The figure sits inside a paragraph about how cross-group friendship is rare and powerful, and then the argument moves on. I stalled there, because a country with that much nominal contact and that little friendship is not a country waiting to be introduced to itself. Something holds the two apart, and diagnosing it is exactly what a hypothesis about threat perception ought to be good for. A single sentence concedes that the moderate middle needs a galvanising cause, a moon shot or a common enemy, before ideologues will come back to the table. That sentence deserved a chapter.
Which returns me to the feather. The Siberian experiment turned on Hare noticing something both populations already wanted, badly enough to override the difference between them. The political chapters never find their feather.
The science underneath is careful in a way that leaves it exposed. The prediction about receding brow ridges could have failed against 1,421 skulls and did not. Self-domestication is measurable in bone, in the ratio between the index and ring fingers of Middle Pleistocene hands, in the lost pigment that left our sclerae white while every other primate keeps its eyes camouflaged. “At some point, we went from camouflaging our eyes to advertising them.” You can hold that against a fossil and check it. Nothing in the chapters on the cure can be checked that way, and those are the most confident sentences in the book.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com
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