“In a word, this book is ‘The Selfish Gene’ by Michael Sandel.”

★ Recommended by KAIST Neuroscientist Professor Jaeseung Jeong ★
★ Recommended by Professor Sang-Wook Kim of the Department of Physics at Kyung Hee University ★

Conspicuous consumption, university rankings, and the conflict between progressives and conservatives.
Homophobia, lookism, capitalist exploitation, …
An expanded version of "The Selfish Gene," which dissects modern society from an evolutionary perspective!

It's been nearly 50 years since Richard Dawkins's "The Selfish Gene" was published, and a full 30 years since "The Evolution of Desire," which delved into the love between men and women, was published.
However, virtually no books have explored the family, politics, economy, society, and culture from an evolutionary or genetic perspective. The author, a professor of bio and brain engineering at KAIST and a human genomicist, addresses this issue. Drawing on cutting-edge research published in leading academic journals such as Nature, Science, and Cell, he dissects today's unequal economy, politics of hate, exploitative society, and meritocracy.
Specifically, it denounces how the human survival and reproductive instincts implanted by genes are disguised as distorted mating desires and twisted love for children, as hatred and social stigma, as conspicuous consumption and exploitative behavior, as justification for vested interests, as a vague fear of scientific progress, and as the illusion that nature is beautiful and sublime, leading to all sorts of misfortune and social absurdity.
Furthermore, we seek a way to escape from the various tragedies that arise from humans unconsciously following selfish genes.

Applying this hypothesis to the issue of inheritance, it is predicted that wealthier families will leave more money to their sons, while poorer families will leave more to their daughters.
This has been proven by actual data.
An analysis of 1,000 wills left by Canadians found that in wealthier families, sons received twice as much as daughters, while in poorer families the opposite was true.

--- p.34

Additionally, a study analyzing the wills of Americans found that when a husband dies before his wife, he often leaves most of his assets to his wife, whereas when a wife dies before her husband, the wife often disqualifies her husband from inheriting and passes the assets directly to her children.
The biological reasons are clear.

--- p.43

On March 4, 2020, to mark World Obesity Day, the journal Nature Medicine published a joint statement from experts around the world calling for an end to the stigma surrounding obesity.
Rather than working to reduce obesity, social pressure is actually worsening mental health problems, making it a serious health problem.
The bias against obese people is unjustified, as genetics account for as much as 40 to 70 percent of the variation in body mass index between individuals.

--- p.54~55

The biological basis for homosexual orientation is abundant.
(···) First, statistically, people who have a homosexual sibling are very likely to become homosexual themselves.
(···) Third, mothers of homosexual sons and their maternal female relatives have more children than heterosexual sons.
(···) However, this does not mean that homosexuality itself is a noble love.
(···) It is widely known that most of the sexual crimes committed in the Catholic Church were committed by priests who were homosexuals.

--- p.72~75

In particular, the striking and brilliant colors of birds, the peacock's tail or the deer's antlers that make movement difficult, and the bold behavior of the Thomson's gazelle, which jumps up and down in place instead of running away when encountering predators, are all display behaviors that advertise that they are healthy enough to survive even in unfavorable conditions.
This behavior is called 'costly signaling' based on the handicap theory proposed by Israeli animal ecologist Professor Amots Zahavi, which has been widely proven in evolutionary biology.

--- p.86

True play, as [Johann Huizinga] speaks of it, is a purely free act that becomes an end in itself.
But the fierce reproductive competition of Homo sapiens has transformed even play into a costly signal.
Playing well has become a symbol of wealth and power.
Even the mere act of showing off one's skills can be a huge money-maker in today's world of professional sports, entertainment, and popular arts.
In this way, Homo ludens evolved into a limited class of Homo sapiens who enjoyed playing with tools to show off their reproductive competitiveness.

--- p.90

The key to exploitation competition among living things is to secure an advantageous position, and this is also true in the human economy.
The act of first occupying land where production can take place and then taking the value generated there in the form of rent is exploitation.
(···) The concept of land is not limited to physical land.
Today, land taxes also apply to rents for residential and commercial buildings.
Simply put, renting a home is exploiting the wages of the workers who live there.
(···) Professor Machucato points out that today's IT-based giants, which are in the spotlight for their innovative image, are also carrying out massive value extraction in the form of unproductive rents.

--- p.95~97

First, a 2011 study used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine the brain structure of 90 people and found that people with a stronger progressive tendency had a larger gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas people with a stronger conservative tendency had a larger gray matter volume in the amygdala.
(···) In 2022, a study was also published showing that functional MRI data can be analyzed using the latest artificial intelligence technique called deep learning to accurately estimate a person's political inclinations.

--- p.121

In fact, anthropologist Helen Fisher, after synthesizing the results of many previous studies, speculated that serotonin may be at the basis of conservative tendencies.
That is, people with high serotonin levels tend to follow social norms and avoid risks, prefer concrete and clear things over theoretical and complex things, value order and authority, and often have strong religious tendencies.
Conversely, Fisher identified dopamine as the neurotransmitter that creates progressive tendencies.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that governs the reward circuit, and when dopamine secretion is high, animals exhibit behaviors that explore new things.

--- p.125

Genome-wide association studies suggest that the genetic factors that determine these different mating behaviors are linked to political leanings, which, if true, could actually lead to differences in reproductive rates between conservatives and liberals.
(···) Accordingly, there is a study that actually compared the number of children between conservative and progressive groups.
The massive study, which surveyed more than 152,400 people from 100 countries around the world, including 65,900 Europeans and 6,200 Americans, found that families with conservative political leanings had significantly more children than those with liberal leanings.

--- p.130

In fact, there are studies that analyze the evolutionary patterns of those living in extreme environments, such as extremely cold climates or high altitudes.
Surprisingly, it was found that these mutations were positively selected in the population studied, meaning they were advantageous for adaptation to this environment.
In other words, cancer is not simply caused by the 'physical side effects' of cold 'weather', but rather genetic mutations that increase 'evolutionary fitness' in cold 'climates' biologically increase the incidence of cancer.

--- p.165

From a metaphysical point of view, this universe is not a space that exists for life.
(···) In fact, the quantum mechanical instability of the atoms that make up the universe has been causing problems since the beginning of life, right up until now.
For example, a phenomenon was observed in Nature where a specific nucleotide was instantly changed to a different sequence and then returned to its original state due to quantum fluctuations in DNA itself.
That is, when DNA polymerase recognizes the nucleotide that has changed instantaneously and combines the corresponding sequence, and when the changed nucleotide returns to its original state, an error occurs right there.

--- p.185

In 2012, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring, Professor Anthony Treobas, a botanist at the University of Edinburgh, along with Professor Christopher Lieber, a botanist at the University of Oxford, Professor Bruce Ames, a biochemist and molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Peter Lachmann, an immunologist at the University of Cambridge, and Richard Tren of the American Food and Agriculture Organization (AFM), published a rebuttal in the journal Nature, arguing that it was not appropriate to call Silent Spring a "beacon of reason."
Because of the excessive fear of DDT based on faulty scientific evidence, an estimated 60 to 80 million people, including countless children, died needlessly.

--- p.194