BOOKSHELF 



By Laurence A. Marschall 



Us and Them: 

 Utiderstanding Your Tribal Mind 



by David Bcrrchy 

 Little, Brown and CoDtpaiiy, 2005; 

 $26.95 



The stereotype," as thejournalist and 

 political coiiinieiitator Walter 

 Lippmann wrote in his 1922 book. 

 Public Opinion, "saves time in a busy life," 

 enabling all of us to quickly establish how 

 we shovild relate to others. Does the 

 woman in the maroon coat mean well 

 or ill? Is she an employee or a customer. 



rience, is ultimately rooted in behavioral 

 genetics. No animal can survive for long 

 without being able to distinguish mem- 

 bers of its own species from predators, 

 and nature rewards individuals that can 

 effortlessly tell the nutritious bugs from 

 the poisonous ones. Socially speaking, 

 natural selection tavors the ability to 

 distinguish kin ("our family") from 

 strangers, because our genes profit from 

 helping our blood relatives survive. 



That tendency is particularly appar- 

 ent in primates, whose social world is 

 notably convoluted and complex. The 

 seminal work of Frans B.M. de Waal, a 



Jews and non-Jews alike wear yellow stars at a protest against a neo-Nazi 

 desecration of Jewish graves in Carpentras, France. Among the protesters, 

 the yellow stars were intended to mock and subvert a well-known symbol of 

 the Nazi effort to create divisions between "us" and "them." 



a stucient or a teacher, a police officer 

 or a shoplifter? A second's glance often 

 suffices to tell. The downside, of course, 

 is that people are not always what they 

 seem at a glance: the tattooed man in 

 the motorcycle jacket may well be 

 chairman of the board; that earnest, 

 clean-cut chap may be a serial killer. In 

 its worst form, stereotypical thinking 

 leads to hate crimes and acts of terror- 

 ism. At its very least, writes Lippmann, 

 the stereotype "tends to preserve us from 

 all the bewildering effects of trying to 

 see the world steadily and see it whole." 



David Berreby s book is an eloquent 

 effort to view the world steadily and 

 whole. Human "kind-mindedness," as 

 Berreby sees it, however strongly it may 

 seem linked to social and political expe- 



primatologist at Emory University in 

 Atlanta, for instance, has demonstrated 

 that chimpanzees have elaborate proto- 

 cols for dealing with unfamiliar indi- 

 viduals. Not only do the chimpanzees 

 react to apes outside their social group, 

 but when they interact with people, they 

 also view with suspicion any person they 

 don't recognize as part of the group they 

 see every day. When we humans divide 

 the world into "us" and "them," we're 

 just doing what comes naturally. 



Berreby suggests that a little science 

 might help people overcome such 

 primate tendencies toward Manichean 

 thinking. By its strict rules of evidence 

 and its insistence on expressing differ- 

 ences not as yes-or-no statements but 



as degrees of confidence and uncer- 

 tainty, science provides an effective an- 

 tidote to false perceptions of "us" ver- 

 sus "them." For example, according to 

 Berreby, DNA analysis gives the lie to 

 commonsense ideas about race: 



Genetically, almost all variations in liuman 

 DNA are found in all races. As the chem- 

 istry ot ink on your money gives no clue 

 to its economic value, so human genetics 

 doesn't support today's notion of race. 



Nor does science recognize any genetic 

 or physiological basis for divisions of 

 people by nation, class, ideology, or re- 

 ligion — a fact that perceptive individu- 

 als have known for centuries. 



Berreby argues for diversity and tol- 

 erance, hardly a novel position, but one 

 resonant with the insights and senti- 

 ments of wise men since the dawn of 

 civilization. What makes his argument 

 powerful is the wealth of information 

 he has marshaled, from disciplines as 

 diverse as molecular genetics, neuro- 

 biology, quantitative history, and social 

 psychology. But what makes his book 

 so poignant is that despite the wealth 

 of data pointing in his direction, so 

 much pohtical capital is being spent 

 these days in accentuating and perpet- 

 uating our differences, instead of in 

 trying to understand, accommodate, 

 and eventually overcome them. 



In the Company 

 of Crows and Ravens 



by Jolin M. Marzluff and Tony Angell 

 Yale Unii'ersiry Press, 2005; $30.00 



Crows and ravens, among the com- 

 monest of birds, command our at- 

 tention more insistently than do any of 

 our other flying friends. Sparrows hardly 

 enter our peripheral vision, pigeons an- 

 noy us, but the black-feathered corvids 

 surprise us, instruct us, and intrigue us. 



The human tascination with crows 

 and ravens has deep roots in history. 

 They are the tricksters of Native Amer- 

 ican myth, the inscrutable specters of 

 Poe's midnight reverie, and the wise- 

 cracking comedians of such children's 



NAIURAI. HIS IDKY February 2006 



