• “Psychologist and zoologist David Barash feels that our intolerance of the handicapped comes in part from an ancient impulse to distance ourselves from those who may be carrying one of the primary killers of pre-modern men and animals—infectious disease.10 There may be merit to his argument. But I suspect the urge to impose physical uniformity springs from the principles which turn a group into a complex adaptive system, a collective intelligence, a learning machine.”

“Remember a networked learning machine’s most basic rule: strengthen the connections to those who succeed, weaken them to those who fail. The monkey with a broken limb botched an attempt to maneuver across a tricky landscape. The lizard with the missing tail was insufficiently wily to avoid the teeth of an enemy. The wailing gull may have owed her woes to bad decisions or poor genes. And the noseless member of the Byzantine royal family wore the sign of his incompetence at power games on his face. Our intolerance of deviations from a physical norm seems bundled into us at birth. Human studies from all over the world show that infants as young as two months old already prefer attractive to unattractive faces. Physical beauty is so rare that it seems to us the exception, not the rule. But not all that seems obvious is true. Ironically, the most attractive faces scientists have been able to construct are composites of photos of as many as thirty-two regular people, their features blended to create a perfect average.12 Study after study shows that what we rate as beauty is a median, a midpoint, an archetypal mode, the kernel at the core of typicality! Further studies demonstrate that we fawn over those whom we deem beautiful, clustering around them, overrating their intelligence, anxious to be their friends.13 We flock to what seems special, never knowing it’s the essence of normalcy.”

• “Unattractive children or children with strange religious backgrounds, funny names, and unusual ethnic roots are the usual targets for these torments. Kids punish those who do far better than average in school and those who do far worse. One third-grader was cursed with talent—she was outstanding at piano, ballet, and reading. Her classmates hated her. She tried to be pleasant to everyone, but was labeled a snob and treated with the derision her atypical abilities “deserved.””
• “Like chimpanzees and apes, we avoid the deformed and different. In one study an actor was asked to collapse convincingly and dramatically in the middle of a subway car. The apparent victim of a serious problem was much less likely to get help if he had a large birthmark.”
• “Here’s a bit of irony—conformity is strengthened when it’s shored up by its “enemy”—diversity…Diversity generators also benefit larger beasts. Macaque monkey females, like some women and men, can’t resist the appeal of strangers from outside their group. The fruit of their promiscuity is an influx of fresh genes, whose introduction to the reproductive pool prevents the troop from becoming stagnant and vulnerable to disease.”
• “The tendency of those alike to fight when times get tough defies a cardinal rule of the theory of the selfish gene—that the closer we are in the makeup of our chromosomes, the more we will work together as a team. The violation is particularly strong in the battle of brother against brother. Species of genetically related ants are, in E. O. Wilson’s words, “the least likely to tolerate each other’s presence.” The same sometimes applies to human beings. On his way through the Alps to spring his surprise attack on Rome, Hannibal ran across two groups of Gauls on the verge of battle. The problem? A pair of brothers were fighting over who would head the tribe. How could evolution favor feuds which current theory says should never be? Creative bickering has been honed by natural selection because, in pitting father against son and brother against brother, it opens up new avenues to genes, clans, cliques, and species. It slices through genetic bonds to generate diversity.”
• “The success of a society depends on the dance between its repulsers and attractors, its huddle and its squabble, its elements of competition and of cooperation. One of our most powerful attractors is an instinct often overlooked in treatments of human history. It’s the principle of reciprocity. Bacteria give each other information, and even change forms to eat what others find poisonous. To pay for this cleanup effort, the bacterium whose environment is cleansed turns more raw material into food for its decontaminator.”
• “During epidemics, the rich have nearly always outsurvived the poor. In some cases they’ve even benefited, as did the founder of the Krupp fortune, a wealthy burgher during the Black Death of 1349 who bought up scads of properties left vacant by plague-eradicated families for mere pennies, and whose descendants prospered off his callous canniness well into the twentieth century.25 Krupp’s windfall shows how those who master the art of social integration are privileged to protect themselves from the probability of death. Krupp had money, a bonus shoveled toward those who specialize in the skills of mass sociality. Other virtuosos of large-scale connectivity include politicians Experts in web building are given larger, more hygienic, safer living spaces, more generous and nutritionally varied allotments of food, and servants to help them avoid such crippling daily chores as heavy lifting or grinding meal for beer and bread.”
• “Nurture and nature both play a role in shaping the way the inner-judges of adults behave. Culture affects the manner in which mothers raise their children, and that, in turn, helps shift the balance between boldness and vulnerability. Seventy-five percent of American one-year-olds studied are upset when their mothers leave the room and abandon them with a stranger, but only 33 percent of West German babies seem disturbed. Thanks to their country’s child-rearing style, the inner-judges of West German infants cut them a bit more slack to handle things independently.”
• “Healthy inner-judges shift a creature from inhibition to boldness depending on the signals hinting at its value to society. Babies receive these signals from the interest their mothers and others show in what they try “to say.” When babies invite you to play, you can see their inner-judges wilt them if you frown or thrill them if you grin and bend down to clown around. When a mother comes back into a room after leaving a baby with a stranger, some calm down quickly, some don’t, and others are relatively indifferent. The easily comforted tend to be the ones blessed with an engrossed mom who listens to her baby’s sounds, watches its face and eyes, and twines her coos and burbles with her infant’s in emotional duet.”
• “This sort of multimillennial hoard of perceptual allure also gets compressed into a quality called prestige.42 Prestige is the attention stored in titles like doctor, president, prime minister, and king. Much as we deny the fact, we cozy up to those who’ve got prestige and shy away from those who don’t.43 We put our confidence in those who’ve commandeered it, and shun the same message—even if delivered in the very same words—from the mouths of lesser folk.”

• “Molecular sensors, bacteria, crustaceans, ungulates, primates, and intellectuals—we are very much the same. We act as nodes in a neural net. Thanks to resource shifters, we follow the lead of victors in the mass perception game.”
• “The Athenian strategy moves to the top when things are going well. Spartanism grabs the throne when the world is going to hell.”
• “Our body, too, has a knowledge base it gains from plug-ins to the microbial brain. At first, we used microbes accidentally. Bacteria in our intestines provided us with skills we didn’t have. They manufactured pantothenic acid, a vitamin without which we would stop growing, develop skin sores, and end up prematurely gray. “Friendly bacteria” also fed our needs for folic acid and for vitamin K.9 Bacteria produced our body odors. This may sound pretty ghastly, but our aroma contains pheromones with which we communicate. The fragrance we give off has been shown to play a crucial part in our sex lives10 and to bring the menstrual cycles of women who live together into synchrony.”

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