But some of the most painful shocks come from the social world—from the manipulations and betrayals of other people. According to the fable, a scorpion asked a frog to carry him across a river, reassuring the frog that he wouldn’t sting him because if he did, he would drown too. Halfway across, the scorpion did sting him, and when the sinking frog asked why, the scorpion replied, “It’s in my nature.” Technically speaking, a scorpion with this nature could not have evolved, but Trivers has explained why it sometimes seems as if human nature is like the fabled scorpion nature, condemned to
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