Liars and Outliers (43 page)

(3)
It's commonly asserted that countries with authoritarian governments have low crime rates: that in these countries, both good and bad defectors are stamped out. And if we want to live in a free country where dissent is tolerated, we necessarily need to tolerate some level of crime. It's a good story, and it may be true, but there's not much in the way of supporting data. The problems are twofold. One: in authoritarian regimes, government-generated data pertaining to crime rates is vulnerable to distortion and manipulation, especially since the regime is motivated to flatter and defend itself. And two: crime statistics provided by authoritarian regimes are likely to be skewed by the absence of figures for crimes condoned or carried out by the state or against marginalized groups. So while rates of reported street crime like muggings, burglaries, and murders are often said to be lower under authoritarian regimes such as the former USSR, former East Germany, and Nazi Germany than in democratic countries, it might be that stamping out dissent doesn't actually make the streets safer. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he just made it illegal to complain about them.

(4)
There's an interesting analogy between protecting against defectors and vaccinating to achieve herd immunity. Society doesn't have to completely fix the problem of defections; it just has to fix it well enough that individuals are not likely to run into the problem. Doing so is much more cost-effective than trying to bring the scope of defection down to zero.

(5)
This quote, widely
attributed to King
, is actually his paraphrase of an older quote by the abolitionist Theodore Parker from 1853: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

References

Chapter 1

contain parasites
Cory Doctorow (2005), “All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites,” O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, California. Christopher Langton, ed. (1994),
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their own privacy
Bruce Schneier (15 Jul 2009), “Facebook Should Compete On Privacy, Not Hide It Away,”
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effectively looted
Jeff Gottlieb (22 Jul 2010), “Bell Council Found Loophole in Law to Allow Big Salaries,”
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internal cheating
Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw (2007),
Exploiting Online Games; Cheating Massively Distributed Systems,
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trust is a bet
Piotr Sztompka (1999),
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Trust involves
Russell Hardin (1992), “The Street-Level Epistemology of Trust,”
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14:152–76.

impersonal trust
Susan P. Shapiro (1987), “The Social Control of Impersonal Trust,”
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described trust
Don Tapscott and David Ticoll (2003),
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Trust is the expectation
Francis Fukuyama (1995),
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three critical functions
Barbara Misztal (1996),
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recent example
David Remmick (1993),
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value of trust
Francis Fukuyama (1995),
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trust is the atmosphere
Sissela Bok (1978),
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Chapter 2

territorial chorus
Tim Clutton-Brock (2009), “Cooperation between Non-Kin in Animal Societies,”
Nature
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hornworms
André
Kessler, Rayko Halitschke, Celia Diezel, and Ian T. Baldwin (2006), “Priming of Plant Defense Responses in Nature by Airborne Signaling between Artemisia tridentata
and
Nicotiana attenuate,
”
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plasmids secrete
Michael B. Yarmolinsky (1995), “Programmed Cell Death in Bacterial Populations,”
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Heat and light
Henry Lutz Ehrlich and Dianne K. Newman (2009),
Geomicrobiology,
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first animal predator
Ben Harder (9 Apr 2002), “Was This the Earth's First Predator?”
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The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins (1976),
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defend against
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jawed fish
Charles A. Janeway (2006),
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orienting response
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particularly good
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throw things
Justin. N. Wood, David D. Glynn, and Marc D. Hauser (2007), “The Uniquely Human Capacity to Throw Evolved from a Non-Throwing Primate: An Evolutionary Dissociation between Action and Perception,”
Biology Letters
, 3:360–5.

size-weight misperception
Qin Zhu and Geoffrey P. Bingham (2011), “Human Readiness to Throw: The Size-Weight Illusion Is Not an Illusion When Picking the Best Objects to Throw,”
Evolution & Human Behavior
, 32:288–93.

Similar stories
Stephen Jay Gould (Oct 1985), “Not Necessarily a Wing,”
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, 94:12–25.

weird security
Randolph M. Nesse (2001), “The Smoke Detector Principle: Natural Selection and the Regulation of Defensive Responses,”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
, 935:75–85.

Red Queen Effect
Leigh Van Valen (1973), “A New Evolutionary Law,”
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, 1:1–30. Leigh Van Valen (1977), “The Red Queen,”
The American Naturalist
, 111:809–10. Matt Ridley (1994),
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continuously improve
Seth Finnegan, Jonathan L. Payne, and Steve C. Wang (2008), “The Red Queen Revisited: Reevaluating the Age Selectivity of Phanerozoic Marine Genus Extinctions,”
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, 34:318–41. Michael J. Benton (2009), “The Red Queen and the Court Jester: Species Diversity and the Role of Biotic and Abiotic Factors Through Time,”
Science
, 323:728–32. Michael J. Benton (2010), “Evolutionary Biology: New Take On the Red Queen,”
Nature
, 463:306–7.

other animals
Edward A. Wasserman, Thomas R. Zentall (2006),
Comparative Cognition: Experimental Explorations of Animal Intelligence
, Oxford University Press. Zhanna Reznikova (2007),
Animal Intelligence: From Individual to Social Cognition
, Cambridge University Press. Jeremy Taylor (2009),
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supply our brains
Adam D. Pfefferle, Lisa R. Warner, Catrina W. Wang, William J. Nielsen, Courtney C. Babbbitt, Olivier Fedrigo, and Gregory A. Wray (2011), “Comparative Expression Analysis of the Phosphocreatine Circuit in Extant Primates: Implications for Human Brain Evolution,”
Journal of Human Evolution
, 60:205–12.

cultural evolution
Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending (2009),
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Nicholas Humphrey
Nicholas Humphrey (1976), “The Social Function of Intellect,” in Paul Patrick Gordon Bateson and Robert A. Hinde, eds.,
Growing Points in Ethology
, Cambridge University Press, 303–17.

Daniel Gilbert
Daniel Gilbert (2 Jul 2006), “If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming,”
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capacity for deception
Richard W. Byrne and Nadia Corp (2004), “Neocortex Size Predicts Deception Rate in Primates,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
, 271:1693–9.

non-primate mammals
James K. Rilling and Thomas R. Insel (1999), “The Primate Neocortex in Comparative Perspective Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging,”
Journal of Human Evolution
, 37:191–223.

neocortex correlates
Robin I.M. Dunbar (1992), “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates,”
Journal of Human Evolution
, 20:469–93.

mean human group
Robin I.M. Dunbar (2003), “The Social Brain: Mind, Language, and Society in Evolutionary Perspective,”
Annual Review of Anthropology
, 32:163–81. Alberto Hernando, Diego Villuendas, Cristina Vesperinas, Marta Abad, and Ángel Plastino (2010), “Unravelling the Size Distribution of Social Groups with Information Theory on Complex Networks,”
The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter & Complex Systems
, 76:87–97.

number appears regularly
R.A. Hill and Robin I.M. Dunbar (2003), “Social Network Size in Humans,”
Human Nature
, 14:53–72.

mean group size
Robin I.M. Dunbar (2003), “The Social Brain: Mind, Language, and Society in Evolutionary Perspective,”
Annual Review of Anthropology
, 32:163–81.

died in warfare
Steven A. LeBlanc and Katherine E. Register (2003),
Constant Battles: Why We Fight,
St. Martin's Press. Samuel Bowles (2009), “Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors?”
Science
, 324:1293–8.

Paul Seabright
Paul Seabright (2004),
The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life
, Princeton University Press.

other species
J. Maynard Smith and George R. Price (1973), “The Logic of Animal Conflict,”
Nature
, 246:15–8.

should primarily hunt
Craig B. Stanford (2001), “A Comparison of Social Meat-Foraging by Chimpanzees and Human Foragers,” in Craig B. Stanford and H. Bunn, eds.,
Meat-Eating and Human Evolution
, Oxford University Press. Gottfried Hohmann (2009), “The Diets of Non-Human Primates: Frugivory, Food Processing, and Food Sharing,” in Jean-Jacques Hublin, Michael P. Richards, eds. (2009),
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all primitive societies
Steven A. LeBlanc and Katherine E. Register (2003),
Constant Battles: Why We Fight
, St. Martin's Press.

David Buss
David M. Buss (2006),
The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill
, Penguin, 40.

quite violent
Steven A. LeBlanc and Katherine E. Register (2003),
Constant Battles: Why We Fight,
St. Martin's Press. David M. Buss (2006),
The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill
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some argue
Steven Pinker (2011),
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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kill in war
Dave Grossman (1995),
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
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with other primates
Lars Rodseth, Richard W. Wrangham, Alisa M. Harrigan, and Barbara B. Smuts (1991), “The Human Community as a Primate Society,”
Current Anthropology
, 32:221–54. Bruce M. Knauft (1991), “Violence and Sociality in Human Evolution,”
Current Anthropology
, 32:391–428. Christoph P.E. Zollikofer, Marcia S. Ponce de Leon, Bernard Vandermeersch, and Francois Leveque (2002), “Evidence for Interpersonal Violence in the St. Cesaire Neanderthal,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
, 99:6444–8. Margaret C. Crofoot and Richard W. Wrangham (2010), “Intergroup Aggression in Primates and Humans: The Case for a Unified Theory,” in Peter M. Kappeler and Joan M. Silk, eds.,
Mind the Gap: Tracing the Origins of Human Universals
, Springer.

Chapter 3

division of labor
Edward O. Wilson (1987), “Causes of Ecological Success: The Case of the Ants,”
Journal of Animal Ecology
, 56:1–9. Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson (2009),
The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies
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The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct
, W.W. Norton & Co.

Hawk-Dove game
John Maynard Smith and George R. Price (1973), “The Logic of Animal Conflict,”
Nature
, 246:15–8.

war of all against all
Thomas Hobbes (1651),
Leviathan
, Printed for Andrew Crooke, at the Green Dragon in St. Paul's Churchyard.