Cover drawing by Anthony Gross. Wikicommons/ jonathan229. Some rights reseved.The bloodshed in and around the Islamic world and the outburst of hostility to refugees and other migrants in Europe and the United States are so horrifying that it is hard to believe what is going on, hard to see why Mr Trump and the leaders of ISIS are being so horrible - and so successful.
The principal explanation, I believe, is simple but one that people are reluctant to recognise: ugly human instincts to fear and hate that are normally dormant in us are being aroused, inflamed and played upon by power-seeking demagogues, including European opponents of migration.
As an amateur who has read a lot of the modern evolutionary literature, I believe one can safely say that through the normal process of evolutionary selection we have inherited instincts to fear and hate. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, like their precursors and many other species, competed in groups, in our case ‘tribes’, for resources, notably territory but also captives and loot. Those tribes that were ready to fight rival tribes in order to defend or gain resources will have survived at the expense of those that, being passive, were overrun. Consequently, defensive-aggressive instincts will have been passed down to us. Since the historic pace of genetic change has been extremely slow, and it is unlikely yet to have been greatly accelerated by man-made changes to the social environment, one would expect these instincts still to be prevalent within us. And what we see around us today is convincing horrible evidence that that is so.
