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New Book

MsSage

Well-known member
LOL gotta get and read this book :wink:


Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend




We've all run into people whose endearing charms camouflage a Machiavellian core. Even after we have been burned repeatedly, our good nature persuades us to give them the benefit of the doubt. They are, writes author Barbara Oakley, "successfully sinister."

How do some people get that way, and what allows them to survive and often rise to positions of leadership? Those are the central questions of Oakley's new book, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend.

As her title suggests, she believes much of the explanation of those people's behavior can be found in their DNA.

Of course genes alone do not dictate behavior. Environment, experiences, and circumstances can bring out the best or worst in any of us. Few people with a genetic predisposition toward sinister behavior turn out like Hitler, Stalin, Slobodan Milosevic, or Mao Zedong.

Most live more ordinary lives, like Oakley's sister, Carolyn. Their successes turn out to be illusory, and their lives are marked by a trail of emotional scars on people who care about them. In the workplace, the successfully sinister generate turmoil and leave a trail of damaged careers in their professional wake.

Working in the notoriously Machiavellian halls of academe (she is a professor of biomedical engineering at Oakland University in Michigan), Oakley had plenty of opportunities to observe such people up close. But having Carolyn as a sister no doubt motivated her to explore those questions.

Beginning her research, Oakley found an astonishing gap. She writes about exploring the authoritative Medline database for information on the physiology and biochemistry of Machiavellianism. "Antisocial personality disorder" turns up 5494 hits. "Borderline personality disorder" generates 3090 "meaningful hits, including hundreds of imaging studies, genetic studies, drug studies, and so on."

However, she continues, "...if I type in 'malignant narcissist'--a term used by world-class psychiatrists...to describe the kind of malevolent, yet high functioning people I'm researching--I get nothing. Zero hits. No medical studies whatsoever." (Emphasis in original)

That discovery was "unsettling" to her, "like hearing that the oncologist about to operate on your father's cancerous liver actually has a fake degree from a diploma mill." The book is a narrative of how Oakley began trying to fill in the scientific details.

True to its lengthy subtitle, Evil Genes has something to offer almost every avid nonfiction reader. The gap in Medline notwithstanding, Machiavellianism is well investigated in the behavioral and psychological literature, and Oakley is thorough in her discussion of that research.

Machiavellian behavior, she writes, is probably closely related to borderline personality disorder, so named because it sits on the borderline between psychosis and neurosis. To illustrate its most extreme manifestations, the book devotes entire chapters to Milosevic, "The Butcher of the Balkans," and Chairman Mao, "The Perfect 'Borderpath'," the coined word indicating a particularly evil constellation of borderline personality traits and psychopathic tendencies.

Oakley spends considerable time discussing how such traits might evolve in human populations. She recounts the research into the genetic basis of altruistic behavior. Given the social milieu in which humans have found themselves, individuals who engage in cooperation are more likely to pass along their genes either directly or through the reproductive success of close kin.
 
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