Samuel Brittan

The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes by Stephen Pinker

issue 22 October 2011

It has become a cliché that the great increase in material wealth over the centuries has not been accompanied by any corresponding moral advance. Human nature, it is said, remains the same — with the implication that much of it is pretty nasty. Here, however, comes a leading evolutionary biologist, Stephen Pinker, to claim that human violence has decreased over the millennia and centuries.

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