 Highbridge, a division of recorded books, presents the goodness paradox, the strange relationship between peace and violence and human evolution by Richard Rangham, read by Michael Page. Preface At the start of my career I would have been surprised to learn that fifty years later I would be publishing a book about humans. In the 1970s I was privileged to be a graduate student working in Jane Goodall's research project on chimpanzees in Tanzania. Spending whole days trailing individual apes in a natural habitat was a joy. All that I wanted to do was study animal behaviour, and in 1987 I launched my own study of wild chimpanzees in Uganda's Kibale National Park. My bucolic research was disturbed, however, by discoveries that were too intriguing to ignore. Chimpanzees exhibited occasional episodes of exceptional violence. To shed an evolutionary light on this behaviour, I compared chimpanzees with their sister species, bonobos. In the 1990s research on bonobos was beginning in earnest. Chimpanzees and bonobos were proving to be an extraordinary duo, bonobos being much more peaceful than the relatively aggressive chimpanzees. In various collaborations that I describe in this book, but most particularly with Brian Hare and Victoria Wobber, my colleagues and I concluded that bonobos had diverged from a chimpanzee-like ancestor by a process that was strongly akin to domestication. We call the process self-domestication, and since human behaviour has often been considered similar to the behaviour of domesticated animals, the insights from bonobos suggested lessons for human evolution. The key fact about humans is that within our social communities we have a low propensity to fight. Compared to most wild mammals we are very tolerant. I was acutely aware, however, that even if humans are in some ways notably unreactive, in other ways we are a very aggressive species. In 1996 in a book called Demonic Males, Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Dale Peterson and I described evolutionary explanations for similarities in aggression between chimpanzees and humans. The pervasiveness of violence in human society is inescapable, and the evolutionary theories explaining it seem sound. So how could our domesticated qualities and our capacity for terrible violence be reconciled? For the next twenty years or so I grappled with this question. The resolution that I describe in this book is that our social tolerance and our aggressiveness are not the opposites that at first they appear to be.