Human beings are rarely like this. From birth we are amazingly tolerant of other people. It looks like we too are a domesticated species, selected by a bunch of Dr Belyaevs – each other – to be less reactively aggressive to strangers, the better to survive in urban, agricultural or dense hunter-gatherer settlements. At some point in human prehistory we must have weeded out people who had fast-migrating neural crest cells and hair-trigger reactions. Whether we did this by executing them, generation after generation, or by ostracizing them, or by sending them into battle, or some combination of
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