>> welcome to the program. tonight from harvard, e.o. wilson, author of the social conquest of earth. >> we know now looking at it with clearer eyes that group versus group is fundamental and overpowering phenomenon in human behavior. it was enough to drive whatever group selection was driving. what it was driving was altruism and what we call the traits of virtue. that is, compassion, willingness to cooperate and now that's coming much clear ir. >> rose: and from columbia, eric kandel author of the age of

insight. >> people are frightened away from size because they feel it's difficult. if you take the paindz to explain it, you will be understood by everyone. what i try to do is bridge between signs and humanities with specific examples with vietnamese artist. >> rose: steven pinker authored the better angels of our nature, why violence as declined. >> i think we have noives that lead us to greed, dominance, sadism. it's all with us but human nature has much more than those impulses becausimpulse because e control, a sense of fairness. those are what i called borrowing from lincoln, the better angels of our nature. this is very much a story of what has happened over the course of history that huh loud our angels to prevail. >> wilprevail. >> rose: wilson, kandel and

pinker.

captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: e.o. wilson is one of the most distinguished scientists in the world. he's my favorite people. he joyeded the harvard faculty has an honorary curator. he's a two time recipient of the poorts prize. called him the father of bio diversity. his book the social conquest of earth has the most fundamental questions. where did we come from, who are we and where are we going. thank you for coming. >> thank you, very much. >> rose: you said all new ideas because you do have a new idea here. all new ideas go through three

phases. they are first ridiculed or ignored, then they meet outrage then they are said to have been obvious all along. where is this new idea you have. >> you m outrage with a few beginning to point out that they knew it all along. >> rose: that's part of two and three. >> that's right. >> rose: tell me what the idea is. the book is called the social conquest of earth, which means what? >> well, it means that those creatures on earth who reached a very high level of social organization. >> rose: that would be us. >> that's us. that's one of the big animals. and the social sex and lots of other small creatures that reach very high levels of social organization. >> rose: bees, ants.

>> termites. there are few others that became highly social. pretty well taken over the earth. >> rose: by highly social means simply the capacity to live together in groups. >> it means living together in groups. we use a special term eu social. eu which means good or soid or secure. and we say that word for these societies in which there is a lot of cooperation. and some division of labor so that a few individuals live longer. and reproduce more than the others as part of the social organization. and that's what the ants, bees, wasps and various other ma'am mulz. -- mammals. it raises the question that if high social organization which

we manifest more than anything, is so successful wise and more common. so i've raised the question, and i've also said why does it take so long to evolve. humans, most of the history of life which is over billions of years before we appeared. and the ants, the bees and the wasps dominate. i mean they make up most of the insect biomass, just cheer weight of insects. they didn't appear until, you know, the early age of dinosaurs. they took forever. so the question is, what took so long. and that has lead me, then, to a whole new layer of investigation in which i set out to find out how did it happen. this thing that took so long. >> rose: and? >> and. >> rose: how did it happen?

>> it turns out we just haven't been looking in all of our arguments about what's the main force, what's the main circumstance that preoccupies anthropology about humans and the like. we should have been looking more carefully first of all at all of the social organisms in the world to see if there's a general law. just the way we look at gut bacteria to find out the basic of molecular genetics, just as we look at these little round worms to figure out how cells are put together in brain. we should be looking at all of the different spashz o species s who made this huge leap up in evolution to find out what it was they held in common. in a nutshell, it is this and it explains the rarity and why it took so long. they have to go through a series of steps leading up to the threshold before they go from solitary to advanced social behavior. aand these steps include one

common feature for all of them, and that is the final step is, and it's a solitary species, individual and solitary that lives together, forms or creates an expensive and valuable nest from which it forge forages itsg until they mature. everyone except these species have made the jump over into sociology including human beings had to go through that process and that takes a long time. >> rose: how do you determine who does it and who doesn't do it. >> that's the accidents of evolutionary history. we should look at evolution sort of like a maze. it's start as a solitary and you evolve. we're a species, we evolve. at some point the environment is

changing or the opportunities arise. and you take a turn. you move in a certain direction in evolution. and that might bring you to a dead end insofar as going on to something look advanced social behavior. or you may going through a maze take the right turn. only very few make that right turn. and then most take the wrong term. when the correct turn comes up later and that's still smaller. so by the time we find that the species are awe riefing a arrive point where they could go over and become, get to human levels or the ant levels. the b level, only a tiny percent of all the species that have been evolving for hundreds of millions of years have reached that point where they can cross over. >> rose: you talk about altruism, what do you mean by in context of take the answer. >> well, in ball, w biology, wet

in a special way which means we give up what is called genetic fitness. that is to say you give up some of your expected longevity or the number of children you're likely to produce. or both. in the service of others in the community. and that's what we call altruism of the eu social type. that's how these advanced societies get down together by that type of vision of flavor based on altruism. >> rose: is there a game for altruism -- gene for altruism. >> probably. in human beings we know from twin studies and other evidence that there's a genetic basis for empathy. empathy is a thing that can be measured. we know there are genes there. >> rose: the other two likely to be empathetic. >> people vary in the degrees of

empathy and they are capable of showing just like there are degrees of social responses and various abilities. >> rose: how did you discover william hamilton's kin selection. >> it was brought how the in a journal of theoretical biology in 1964. >> rose: 64. >> yes. i read it and i was first rejecting it. it was too simple. and i read it again and i read it again and then on the train trip going from boston down to miami, i was in a different kinds of field study at that time. i finally said well i guess this really is it. so i went over to london at a meeting of the intaw m intaw --y of london. i saw him wanted ring around and he got down on a thesis.

i went with him to the intaw of instant model society and went with him and defended him because it was a good idea. i'll explain in a moment. it spread very widely and became actively a productive series for a while before it began to decay little bit and break down and obviously we needed something new. it says if you are altruistic towards relatives that share genes with you by common dissent who have identical genes do you to common -- due to common dissent, then you are kin. you will enhance your own genetic fitness, the fitness of those genes that you have that by something of a close relative. you lose a lilt bit of your

fitness, he or she gains and the closer he or she is to you, then the more that person gains in altruism to them. that's what we've been saying for 40 years and i was one of those that pushed the idea the most strongly in the beginning. it's seductively, it's very simple. it seems that is the key to social behavior. the only problem is that it's not true. >> rose: how did you come to that conclusion. >> i gab t began to see that crs were appearing in the whole thing. the people who were working with it and making it a main subject of their research were, didn't seem to be able to get outside of a box. they were working just on a couple of the same phenomena over and over again. i won't bore you by telling you how they work. it's a theory that has expanded

except in statements that some day this will explain this, this and this. i saw it wasn't going anywhere and furthermore parts of it just didn't work. plus i saw that there were a lot of other explanations for how altruism originated. and i covered this with a series of papers that went from 2006 until for four years. and they were mostly ignored pointing out the flaws suggesting how a new theory might be formed. nothing happened until two brilliant mathematicians at harvard spotted the same thing and came to me and we collaborated and it turned out that the basic theory was stated in form, the original theory, in form that created a very difficult mathematical problem to get down to the bottom of it to find out whether it was logically true.

so they took the effort, made the effort for the first time arm the way to the bottom, all the way exploring it fully mathematically and that it was mathematically unsound. at this point i came in and said look also there's a way of explaining most of the biological phenomena of altruism and helping. and i'll tell you what that is. the new theory says it's not so much a new theory it's a revival and new and stronger form which says that natural selection, you know, that's the action in the environment that allows some genes to succeed more than others, really is acting at two levels. it's acting at the level of the individuals competing with one another. within a society, for the most part. and it's acting at the level of group versus group. and we knew, we know now looking at a rumor with clearer eyes, that group versus group is an absolutely fundamental and

overpowering phenomenon in human behavior. it was enough to drive whatever group selection was driving and what it was driving was altruism and what we call the traitl traf virtue. that is compassion, willingness to cooperate and now that's coming much clearer and this two-layered theory is explaining a lot more about human beings. >> rose: there's a very good piece here, this is in the new yorker magazine for march 5th a couple weeks ago. there's a piece by the great -- saying can you open herit altruism. this is the last paragraph. the larger point is that to the extent that altruism exists, it isn't an illusion instead goodness might be an adaptive trait allowing more cooperative groups to outcompete their

conniving suzanneens in a field defined by the scrool logic of natural selection. group selection appears to be the rare hint of virtue. the one biological force pushing back against the obvious advantages of greed and deceit. so altruism is pushing back against greed and deceit which are obvious to us. >> i think the evidence is very strong. all the way through this most advanced social organisms including humans. group selection is a driving force, and the only one we know of or conceive that allows authentic aauthentic altruisticr unrelated to one another in societies as we expand the theory of the origin of social behavior. we're putting it on a foundation

now that's solidly grounded in biology all the way from molecular genetics say to archaeology. now that's what's happening. we can really begin to put things together. now we can approach once again the other two great elements of knowledge and research, social sciences and the humanities and invite joint examination of what could be called a borderland areas. the characteristics of human social behavior, what we know about the origins and nature of culture and how it's troons -- transmitted and our biological traits which determine substantially the directions that these various other forms of human evolution have taken. >> rose: this is joan alera again, it is fueled by the larger debate about altruism.

can true altruism even exist. is generosity a sustainable trait or are living things inherently selfish, our kindness nothing but a mass. this is science with existential stakes. >> and it turns out probably it's the former. altruism and what we consider the best quality of human beings are an expected result of group selection which is the force that drives up species to this very high level in the first place. >> rose: here comes richard ddockens. the logical point that kin selection is not neo darwinism selection. to separate them off would be like talking about -- geometry without talking about the pythagorean theorem. >> he's confused. >> rose: dr. dockens is confused? >> well, richard is a good man

but he does not publish in peer review journals and does not really examine the basic theories. >> rose: he's not a scientist like you. >> well, i don't want to say it that way. but yes, i appreciate his interest. >> rose: so what would darwin think about this. >> darwin i think would be in succession agreement because we find in the decents of man very clear cut statement of group selection. in other words, he had asked a question himself of what makes humans altruistic. and how does one, how does certain societies prevail over others in the grim group versus group battles that he saw of basic human behavior. and darwin then wrote remarkable paragraph in which he described what group selection would be like and what its result would

be like. >> rose: why did you pick this painting. this is the cover here that's a gauguin. why did you pick this. >> i picked it first of all because i saw a marvelous opportunity to he show the coming connection between the creative arch and science advancing into this domain and because in charles darwin's masterpiece, this is the masterpiece, the last great work he did. in the upper left has not corner, this philosophically inkleineinclined artist said. he boldly asked the questions that philosophers long ago abandoned and which science now is left to try to answer. >> rose: you like the big questions, don't you. >> well when you only have several years left of your life ask them now. >> rose: the social conquest of earth, e.o. wilson from

harvard. one of my favorites. >> rose: eric kandel is here he's a medical investigator at columbia university. you night know him as a cohost of the charlie rose brain series which is now in its second season. for years he was interested in the conscious processes of the human brain. he explores this topic in a new book about how the science of the mind engages with art. the book is called the age of insight. i am pleased to have dr. eric kandel back at this table where he comes frequently. welcome. good to have you here. >> of yo nice of you to have me, charlie. >> rose: why call it the able of insight. >> the early 1900's was a very special period in which our view in which our human view was altered. before that there was the human beings of essentially rational creatures essentially created by god. this is the view of the

enlightenment to be different from all other animal species. and then darwin came along and documented how we evolved from simple ancestors and made us realize that there's a continuity in evolution. and the vietnamese extended this to pointing out the human mind is also complicated and not completely rational. there are many irrational components and the idea of an important aspect of the mind being unconscious mental processes instincts that control our behavior emerged in 1900 and emerged from severa different influences that i tried to describe here. >> rose: just a bit of history because it is vienna and it's a place you lived until age 9. >> that's right. >> rose: what's amazing about this for me, and so then you and your brother left on a boat alone. >> that's right. >> rose: your mother had the foresight. >> extraordinary. >> rose: to feel the fear. >> that's right. >> rose: and say early on

work on the visa deal. >> right. what amazes me is that i was a pretty anxious child. and yet she was able to reassure both me and my brother that everything would be fine. imagine at my age crossing the atlantic by ourselves. it's amazing, amazing, yes. >> rose: there's a short film about this which is a documentary about your life. i also take note this book is devoted, is dedicated to the delightful denise who deserves it. but what is the role here as you started to say of vienna, this vienna that you loved because it was the highest probably the highest representation of intellectual life. >> modern collection of life. >> rose: sigmund freud was there. >> absolutely. in many levels, to begin with, medicine was fairly primitive until 1800. and then in the aftermath of the french revolution, french medicine became the scientific.

by 1850, viennese medicine became the dominant force. so it really introduced scientific medicine into clinical practice. and this was led by a guy called -- who is a major driving force in the theme of modernism in my thinking. he was the one that realized that the only way he can make sense of a clinical examination is to correlate the clinical findings with which you see at autopsy. he said truth is hidden from the surface. you have to go deep below the kind to fine it. freud was in vienna school of medicine in the late stages of his career and this is the driving theme of his career. you can't simply accept patient's expression of their illness, psychological expression of their illness as being the only cause of it. you have to go deep into unconscious motivation. and everyone was influenced by

the idea that there are things below the surface that you don't see. the painters that i describe in this book also developed insights into their conscious mental processes. didn't want to just paint pretty pictures, they wanted to see what is charlie rose thinking, what's going on in that great mind behind the face. to go deep into it. and you see this at every point along the way. >> rose: you have said before it is the central challenge of science in the 21st century. the central challenge of science in the 21st century is to understand the brain in biological terms. and that's the journey you took yourself. >> yes, yes. and we're taking it in. >> rose: it's also here in a sense connecting the unconscious. >> exactly. >> rose: with art. and creative expression and understanding creativity as something. >> one thing that's actually characteristic of what you do and what we try to do together, is to treat science as part of

the intellectual enterprise. why should science be less interesting than golf, baseball or tennis. it's an extremely interesting spintellectactual activities. if you take the pains to explain it you can be understood by everyone. what i try to do is bridge between science and humanities with a specific exam owl than a viennese artist. >> rose: there is an interdisciplinary attempt to understand the unconscious. >> right. there was another thing. it affects not only the person who creates art but also the person who observes it. >> that's a very good point. what emerged from students who began to try to put this together, alice regal -- >> rose: we interviewed him. one of the great historians. >> he pointed out when you look at a painting, you're involved in a creative act.

what makes a work of art great is ambiguity. you and i see some different things and the reason we do it is because each of us brings different experiences and the different brains to bear. and we reconstruct the image that we see in our own head. >> rose: what do you want us to understand here about the uncusunconscious? >> that it is a tremendous influence on both the artist and the beholder and that we're beginning to understand how people use both their conscious and unconscious mental processes to respond to work of art. we can outline a scheme of the various steps that are involved in looking at a great painting and having a perceptual response, an emotional respondent and empathic response to it. and we can outline in principle how this occurs. there are a lot of details but this is an initial awe at the presen --attempt.

>> rose: was there a place like vienna since then. >> the renaissance is like this. but what was unusual about vienna, probably also true in florence, the fact that the artists and the scientists spoke to one another and the his thorns spoke to both of them -- historians spoke to both of them. and they focused on common themes. i mean snits jl -- they all try 2350 deal witto deal with this . >> rose: he sort of viewed art as a means to understand the unconscious. >> yes, he did understand but he didn't quite know how to approach it. he thought the best way to try to bring art and science together is to try to analyze the artist. try to do this for leonardo, he tried to do this a little bit

with michaelangelo. these guys were dead. how he tried to get insight to how their mind worked. what the school of art history people like regal, gambridge and christian was to analyze the living beholder. how do they respond to art and this is a terrific approach to bridging art and science. because you can really do experiments to see how do we respond to illusions and what most people didn't realize at the time is that the information we take in is a fraction of what's out there. so we don't really reconstruct -- we reconstruct, we don't see reality as it is. we reconstructed it in our own brain. the brain is a creativity machine. so there are rules that determine how things are putñi together. those in-born but in addition we have what is called top down processing. we have memories of previous experience of people we've seen, works of art we've seen and we use that to compare what's

coming in with what we've experienced before. so there's a rich creative process going on at they could begin to describe in some detail. >> rose: are you more interested, for example, in the artist, the creativity of the artist and the unconscious their. or are you more interested in someone like yourself who appreciates art and who has quote the beholder stair. >> i'm interested in both. i'm a scientist as you well know and i've tried to take a somewhat different approach than an artist destroying my take. i've taken a reduction es approach to this and that is a reductionist takes a large problem that they like and takes a simple example of it and tries to understand it deeply. so i simplified my task in two ways. one is i focused on a limited aspect of arts, only portrayure because we have a specific understanding of the face and only these three parents.

and then alos regal help me because he pointed out again the reductionist step that the way to understand how art and science can be bridged is to focus in the beholder. there are lots of things he could have picked on but focusing on how and i respond to it gives us a tractable problem. >> rose: what's the biological aspect of this? >> there are people who have problems with different aspects of the beholder shakedown. in the simplest case you can be face blind so you can't see portraits at all, okay. so we know the regions that are involved in that, they're in the temporal lobe. or you can be aw particular stik stick -- aw autistic. you can see the but you can't yourself in another person's place. at different points along the line we have a good beginning of the bolg o biology of things bee we've seen this artist interfere with one or other function.

we've learned a lot of normal function with disorders and that's the case with the beholder's share as well. >> rose: ever since i've known you, we have talked about this -- the central question of the relationship between the humanities and science. you are a scientist who loves the humanities, yes. >> and i love trying to discuss signs of non-scientists. and so one of the driving forces to me is to try to get people interested in seeing the bridge between science and humanities to realize that knowing a little bit about how facial perception works and how empathy works enrichardenriches your understaf how you respond to all of that. i think in the long run as we know more and more about the biological processes involve and how people respond to art is not

only going to help you. you enjoy works of heart more but it may even help -- works of art more but it may even help the artist.ñi in da vinci, as you learn more about the body, you can do more. as you understand the mind in biological terms, artists makes insights that really alter the way they depict the psychological sensibility of people. >> rose: what's different about that than any other artist who tries to look at the natural world, you know, and figure out how it is and to observe it's so well that they can capture it in a defining way. >> well, i think all artists, psychologists in a way, they try to get an insight into how a person's functioning. with time, both art form and the

insights people have, have evolved. so modern artists have additional insights. it may not necessarily have an artist's skill but they have new ideas about how the human mind functions that they bring to bear on it. artists have great insights into the functioning of people which they depict. >> rose: right. now when you look at sinuses, do you think that -- scientists, do you think that scientists and artists differ. do they differ in some fundamental way in how they make sense out of world. >> i think there are probably commonnallities to the creative process in scientists and artists. we don't know that but it's quite likely to be that way. >> rose: here's what i love. this is your mentor who said to you, quote, if you want to understand the brain, you're going to have to take a reductionist approach. one cell at a time. >> there is, and this is

wonderful because what do expressionist artists do? they exaggerate things. they bring out the emotion by striking distorting how that emotion is conveyed. we now know that in this region that gives rise to face perception, there are clusters of cells called face patches in which single cells respond to a face. so there's a single cell that responds to charlie rose. if you make a cartoon of a person, the cell responds to it. but one of the things we know about faces -- >> rose: you make a cartoon so it responds. in the same way? >> more dramatically. if you exaggerate the cartoon, push the eyes apart or make a single eye, your cells go wild. so built into the brain is the capability of responding to exaggeration which is what the

artist captured independently. >> rose: but artists didn't. i always bring a serious question by saying what's the big question. what is the question we most want to answer in the pursuit of this bridge? >> we want to understand in detail how do different neurocircuits get involved in responding to a work of art. there is an enormous recreation that is involved in your brain when you look at a work of art. if we understand the enormous amount of our perception. let me give you an example. you look at a painting, it's two dimensional. and yet if the artist was successful, you get a tremendous sense of depth, if he wants to create perspective, shows your face. you see it's sculpted. but the brain knows even though it's recreating this, that it's a flat surface in a painting. and i give you a good example. if you have a painting of a person that is made with the artist looking at the subject's eyes and it's hanging in this

wall, you walk around the painting, the eyes follow you, you must have had that experience many times. >> rose: yes. >> okay. if you put a sculpture there and walk around it, the eyes don't follow you. because the brain knows this is a sculpture. the eyes don't follow you but it realizes the painting is a fiction. it's a two dimensional. this is wonderful to realize how much the brain really unconsciously knows about what's going on, compensates for it and gives you the sense but boy this is really a three-dimensional structure knowing on one level it's two dimensional. >> rose: the age of insight, the quest to understand the unconscious in art, mind and brain from vienna, 1900 to present. thanks to eric kandel, my friend. thank you, a pleasure. >> thank you, charlie. >> rose: harvard psychologist steven pinker was asked five years ago this question. what are you optimistic about. surprisingly his answer was the continued historic decline in violence over the years.

in fact he proposes that we're living in the most peaceable era of our species existence. in his book the better angels of our nature why violence has declined pinker employees this intriguing idea. i'm pleased to have him back at this table. welcome. >> thank you. >> rose: let me talk first about the close which i love from lincoln. and basically the idea of the better angels of our nature comes from this lincoln quote in the first inaugural. we're not enemies but friends. we must not be enemies though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. the mystic cords of memory stretching from every battle field to every living heart and heart stone will yet swell the course of the union when again touched as surely they will be the better angels of our nature. why did you choose that? >> i don't believe it's human nature has changed. i think human nature is complex. i think we have motives that

lead us to violence, greed, revenge, dominance, sadism, they're all with us. but how many nature has more than those impulse but it also has components that can intribute us from violence, empathy, reason, self control, a sense of fairness. those are what i called borrowing from lincoln, the better angels of our nature. so this is very much a story of what has happened over the course of history that has allowed our better angels to prevail. >> rose: lay out the evidence. >> the evidence for the decline comes from a number of periods in history where violence has declined dramatically. number ofbeen a linear smooth births in which major transitions have taken place. one of them is when our ancestors settled down from the anarchy of tribal life of hunting and gathering and gardening to cities, civilizations, agriculture, government. when you have a government, the early kings and emprese emperort

necessarily concerned of the well being of their citizens, they just wanted to stamp out tribal raidings and feudings related to them. but nonetheless the effect was to clamp down on the rate of death and constant blood feuds and raiding. second transition was during the shift in the middle ages to modern times when there was a decline in the rate of homicide by about 35, that is a medieval englishman who was 35 times more likely to be more contemporary. then there was the humanitarian revolution around the time of the enlightenment when barbaric practices like burning people at thstake cutting off bod parts, throwing betters in prison was abolisd and that was the era of the 8th amendment to the u.s. consubstitution to the bon on cruel and unusual punishment. before that people were broken on the wheel, pulled apart by horses all kinds of horrible

tortures. and of course slavery took a while for this country to eliminate it but the momentum began during this 18th century enlightenment. then more recently, since the end of world war ii, there has been an unprecedented almost absence of war between the big powerful rich countries. they used to constantly be at each other's throats but the u.s. and the ussr never met each other directly on the battlefield during the cold war. big rich countries like france, germany, italy, austria and so on have thought better of fighting each other. more recently, there were a lot of rather nasty civil wars and proxy wars during this period. with the decline of a soviet empire starting in 1991, there was a decline in civil wars throughout the world as well. so if you add up owl of the -- all of the different kinds of wars you get a bu bumpy draft wh a downward trend.

with ongoing war few people die in war in this decade since world war ii. >> rose: you say this is the most important thing that happened in human history. >> yes. and some of the public health experts might give me a hard time and i might say the eradication of infectious disease saves more lives but i would argue with them. it's got to be pretty important because not only do you have less of a chance of being murdered or gassed or blown up and you can do things in a peaceful society but you can't in a society that's constantly worried about being invaded. >> rose: is there a theory behind this? >> it's not just one thing that has pushed violence down. i think there were a number of them. i think government is one of the most important. >> rose: an early notion government comes together people have a different stake. >> the judiciary system can remove any incentive you have to attack your neighbors but just as important you move your neighbors' incentive from attacking you. you relax a little bit, you don't have to be a vigilante,

you don't have to think about attack, revenge or deterrence, all of that corlone stuff. i think commerce and trade has something to do witness. if it's cheaper to buy something than plunder it, there's less of an incentive for invasion and other people become more valuable alive than dead if they are potential trading partners. literary, cosmopolitanism, travel, education, free speech have all been forces. they encourage people to empathize more with others by seeing the world from their vantage point. and they also, by considering violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be won, they allow people to use their brain power to think of how can we reduce the tentations for violence all around. what are the institutions we can implement that would reduce the rate of violence. so just the same mastery of the

world about having a problem see if you can solve it. >> rose: where it's led us to non-violence, where does genetics come in. >> it's not impossible that we have evolved to be less violent in the last 800 or the last 3,000 years. but we don't know whether we have or not, and i don't appeal genetics to explain the decline because some of them have been to recent to be explained. the murder rate that's fallen by half since 1992. the decline of war between the states since 1945. we've only had a couple of generations and that's not enough for a darwinian natural election to act. i was just being conservative. if we know there are forces that can't be genetic that can push violence down in a hurry, that's probably all we need to explain the longer term changes to.

>> rose: here's something interesting. i'm from the south. you say there's more violence in the southern part of the united states because of a culture of arne. >> yes. so that's, since colonial times, there's been a huge difference in the homicide rate between the north on the one hand and the south and later the southwest on the other. and that has been around for hundreds of years persistent to this day but it's not predatory violence, it's not killing someone during a rob owe of the liquor stloar - -- robbery or vf the liquor store. a man must defend his honor with the use of violence. there are many cultures that have this ethic and the south is one of them. >> rose: where do you put genocide in this. >> genocide is as old as written history. so the 20th century was certainly not the first isn't tree that saw genocide. it certainly had a -- >> rose: more visible. >> more visible and certainly

there was a burst of hoe receiving genocides -- horrific genocides from the 30's to the 50's and then a few more. i try to plot the trajectory of genocide during the 20th century to see if the genocide shows that nothing as changed. that certainly is not true. if you look at the 20th century it goes up with a peak in the 40's and it comes down. so there have been some horrible genocides like rwanda. but the trend is enormously downward. >> rose: you also suggest, i think you suggest or at least you cite some people who do suggest this. that without hitler there would never have been a holocaust. >> it's always dangerous to play counterfacts with history. that's rewind the tape, see one play and see how the tape unfolds. i think it's a reasonable argument that some holocaust scholars have said no hitler, no holocaust. >> rose: one man. >> one man. >> rose: and views a system

with an idea of hate, so violent that it would lead to the holocaust. >> that's right. and there are obviously the vulnerable niece of thvulnerabie system. indeed. but if historians have looked at other german german politiciansd leaders who have taken the place of hitler, they're got together to -- not going to have the kind of mad inhibitions. >> rose: when you look at what you think is one of the factors that lead to decrease in violence it is a cultured environment. and yet the curlured environment that exist -- cultured environment that existed in prenazi germany was one of the highest levels of cultural enlightenment in the world was it not. >> in some sectors of the population. germany was a complex society. the republic certainly did have that many advanced thinkers, artists and intellectuals. were jewish and they were murdered or driven out.

but germany also had at the same time, it had an old military aristocratic culture. it had a world culture that was deeply anti-semetic for centuries. one is facing back to lutheran and before. and even germany intaw lickuals didn't go into human rights the way the americans and british intellectualses who had. it was still an idea. >> rose: human rights of an an beloanglo american concept. >> the germans had the romantic idea of blood and soil. there isn't the individual that's paramount, it's the tribe, the race and its connection to the land. that's a very different notion than the one that you start with, men, women and children and governments are there just to allow them to pursue their

life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. there was the glory of the nation that was more influential of the ideas. >> rose: i understand we like lists. yours has trends with hunting and gathering and the society which you spoke to. the second trend was civilizing process best documented in europe in the middle ages. the third began with the age of reason and enlightenment saw the first organized movement to abolish social sanctions. fourth being the end of world war ii and then the fifth you said more tenuously to telewith armed combat. it states it may be hard for new readers to believe in 89, organizize the conflicts and genocides, repressions have all declined throughout the world. and the sixth you say is evulsion which is aggression on a smaller scale of minorities, women, children, homosexual and animals. >> yes. and here we see the process

ongoing. so the civil rights evolution put an end first of all to lynching which used to take place at 150 a year in this country by the 1950's that had gone to zero. and other forms of racial intimidation have been drastically reduced. women rights movement put rape on the agenda as a crime. it's down 80% as a result. the children's right has been against strapping in schools. and most of all bullying. who would have thought when we were kids that someone would have thought bullying is human rights violation. it's boy hood. >> rose: predatory, violence, dominance, revenge, sidism, ideology. >> there are different kinds of violence. there's no one thing, three no one such thing as aggression. we have a number of motives. >> rose: we go from six trends to five demons to angels.

sympathy, sell control, moral sense sanctioned by the set of nerms. and there are five sist tore cull forces, commerce fellen -- femininization. >> a female who is head of the state has to play by the rules of the game she did not design. >> rose: the obligation of office. >> exactly. there's reason to think women are more pacifist once they have the responsibility of power than a male would be. but for stupid kinds of violence. pulling out guns when you fight over a parking space. a knife fight over an argument who gets to use the pool table next. respond is to international threats. the men's and women teams are correlated in different societies. there's always a slight or sometimes a large say symmetry in favor of males, favoring war

as foreign policy. the more presidential candidate has been favored by women in each of the last six or seven lookions. >> rose: that's because of? >> well -- >> rose: beyond the evidence you just said as to why there are more men than women. women support the candidate because they take the more devilish candidate is more in line. >> it's more trade off. that is women have more responsibility for sensible things like bringing children up in a safe world. partly it's because of the idea of violence i think clicks a little more with the male mind or female mind. we go back in the evolutionary history. males can fight each other over access to females. they can accumulate harems and abduct wives. for females, there's a lot to lose. if you pick a fight and you're dead and so are your kids. and there's much less to gain. so i think as a result the male brain and the female brain are

slightly differently tuned. just how appealing the idea of violence is. >> rose: what's the most controversial idea you discovered in putting this book together. >> there are a number of them. certainly the 20th century may not have been the most violent in history. that come as a surprise to many people. the possibility that the cold war, the cold peace -- the cold war -- was not necessarily due to nuclear deterrence. that is it wasn't necessarily the u.s. and the soviet union, armageddon. >> rose: it was just change, people have changed or leaderships has changed. >> i think leadership has changed. the idea that the decline in crime of the last 20 years may have been due to more effective policing, including integration of police with communities, not due to apportion as a popular theory would have it. >> police confidence may be a

factor in the decline. >> i think it is. number of police, visibility of police, lowering of corruption, more data, what works, what doesn't. >> rose: the book is called the better by nature why violence has declined by the famefamous steven pinker. >> thank you for having me. >> rose: thank you for joining us. we'll see you next time. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org