Customer Reviews

The Cannibal Within (Evolutionary Foundations of Human Behavior)

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This highly informative book offers great science and great reading. Dr. Petrinovich has careully amassed evidence from a variety of sources. He shows that people in survival situations - shipwrecks, plane crashes, arctic exploration parties, major famines, concentration camps and gulags - follow the same set of strategies before engaging in cannibalism and, once they begin, show similar preferences for whom they would like to have for dinner. The survival stories are varied, instructive, and absolutely fascinating. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of the "lotteries" that determine who will get thrown out of the lifeboat or eaten. Everything is tied together by simple, powerful, Darwinian principles. Dr. Petrinovich has worked hard to achieve accuracy and he acknowledges opposing viewpoints. Although he discusses other forms of cannibalism, such as ritual cannibalism (based on human sacrifice) his main focus is surival cannibalism. He has just about convinced me that under sufficiently atrocious conditions (and they are indeed atrocious) there may be a small touch of "Hannibal Lecter" lurking within each and every one of us.