In this book, Steven Pinker presents a detailed argument that violence has significantly decreased over the course of human history. He uses extensive data and statistical analysis to demonstrate this decline in various domains, including military conflict, homicide, genocide, torture, and the treatment of children, homosexuals, animals, and racial and ethnic minorities. Pinker identifies four key human motivations – empathy, self-control, the moral sense, and reason – as the 'better angels' that have oriented humans away from violence and towards cooperation and altruism. He also discusses historical forces such as the rise of the state (which he terms 'Leviathan'), the spread of commerce, the growth of feminist values, and the expansion of cosmopolitanism, which have contributed to this decline in violence[1][4][5].
Don’t forget THE STUDIES SHOW LIVE—on 9 May in London! You can buy tickets at this link, or by going to bit.ly/tss_live.
What’s going to be the next pandemic? For a long time you might’ve seen news stories about the current threat of H5N1 bird flu, but you probably haven’t paid much attention.
In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart try and work out how worried we should be. Are COVID-scarred people freaking out over nothing? Or are we at the start of something much scarier?
The Studies Show is brought you by Works in Progress magazine, a beautifully-produced magazine about science and technological progress. In the current issue you can read articles about new fertility technologies, land value tax, and the one we mentioned in the show, about prehistoric psychopaths. Find it all at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* The UK’s “Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy”
* “Of course the UK had a herd immunity strategy”
* Tom’s article on “the men who failed Britain”
* The CDC on types of influenza virus
* 2025 Harvard Medical School article on H5N1 bird flu
* Article on the wild animal deaths caused by bird flu in the current outbreak
* And the same for domestic animals
* Egg prices! 1, 2
* 2011 paper on haemagglutinin in avian flu viruses and its infectiousness to humans
* Pigs as the “mixing vessel” for flu viruses
* And the potential for cows to be the same
* The controversial 2012 Science paper that modified a blue flu virus to be more infectious
* The WHO’s seeming low level of concern about the bird flu outbreak
* Pasteurised milk and its effects on bird flu transmission
* The Swift Centre’s forecasts for the bird flu outbreak
* Scott Alexander’s big piece on bird flu
* The evidence for the effect of antivirals on bird flu
* DOGE cuts to a programme that monitored bird flu in dairy products, and to animal monitoring
Credits
We’re very grateful to Claire Wang for her help with researching this episode. The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
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