Join Tim and Shannon as they discuss whether people are born good or evil. They will be delving into the psychology and development of humans, as well as nature vs nurture. Joining us is our Awaken Star, Richard Wrangham, a British anthropologist and primatologist. His research and writing have involved ape behavior, human evolution, violence, and cooking.
Richard Wrangham is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1989. His major interests are chimpanzee and human evolutionary ecology, the evolutionary dynamics of violence and non-violence, and ape conservation. He received his Ph.D. in Zoology from Cambridge University in 1975, was a Research Fellow at King’s College (Cambridge) from 1977 to 1980, and taught at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) from 1981-1989. Since 1987 he has studied wild chimpanzee behavior in Kibale National Park, Uganda. He has been President (2004-2008) of the International Primatological Society, and an Ambassador for UNEP/UNESCO’s Great Ape Survival Project (GRASP). Wrangham was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1987, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. His most recent books are Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books, June 2009) and The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution (Pantheon, January 2019).