Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend (Hardcover)

~ Barbara Oakley (Author)
Key Phrases: successfully sinister, emote control, sinister behavior, Adrian Raine, United States, Red Guards (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Borne out of a quest to understand her sister Carolyn's lifelong sinister behavior (which, systems engineer Oakley suggests, may have been compounded by childhood polio), the author sets out on an exploration of evil, or Machiavellian, individuals. Drawing on the advances in brain imaging that have illuminated the relationship of emotions, genetics and the brain (with accompanying imaging scans), Oakley collects detailed case histories of famed evil geniuses such as Slobodan Milosevic and Mao Zedong, interspersed with a memoir of Carolyn's life. Oakley posits that they all had borderline personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder, a claim she supports with evidence from scientists' genetic and neurological research. All the people she considers, Oakley notes, are charming on the surface but capable of deeply malign behavior (traits similar to those found in some personality disorders), and her analysis attributes these traits to narcissism combined with cognitive and emotional disturbances that lead them to believe they are behaving in a genuinely altruistic way. Disturbing, for sure, but with her own personal story informing her study, Oakley offers an accessible account of a group of psychiatric disorders and those affected by them. Illus. (Oct.)
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Review

"A highly-readable, entertaining, ground-breaking, must-read study with notable insights on the rise and fall of empires; but more importantly, it offers, perhaps for the first time, a distinctly plausible mechanism for explaining the origin and persistence of social inequality." -- Glenn Storey, President, Iowa Society of the Archeological Institute of America, Associate Professor of Classics and Anthropology, University of Iowa, and editor of Urbanism in the Preindustrial World: Cross-Cultural Approaches.

"A magnificent tour through the sociology, psychology, and biology of evil. No one should pass up the experience of stepping through the portals of this fascinating book to answer Oakley's crucial question: Why are there evil people, and why are they sometimes so successful?" -- Dr. Cliff Pickover, author of A Beginner's Guide to Immortality and The Heaven Virus.

"Professor Oakley has done that rare thing: written a scientific book that is at once informative and eminently readable. She has taken 'evil' out of the realm of the religious and metaphysical, placing it instead where it belongs--inside ourselves...." -- Michael H. Stone, MD Professor of Clinical Psychiatry: Columbia

"Remarkable--and difficult to put down ... a wonderfully readable tapestry of family autobiography, historical biography, and biological psychology. Without oversimplifying their psychosocial complexity, Evil Genes explores new research on the genetics and neurobiology of personality disorders. Shining this light on some of the most problematic figures of our era, it challenges our assumptions about the roots of terrorism, genocide, crime, corruption--and even the sinister sides of politics, business, and religion." -- Terrence W Deacon, Professor of Biological Anthropology and Neuroscience, University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Symbolic Species.

"Whatever you might believe about the role of genetics versus environment, Evil Genes will take you somewhere you haven't been. Barbara Oakley brilliantly reveals the falseness of one of the ego's evil little lies: That all our behavior is decided by us." -- Gavin de Becker, Bestselling Author, The Gift of Fear

"...Oakley interweaves many ideas to present a fascinating treatise on the nature of evil in the world. Using an exceptionally easy and readable style, Oakley challenges us to think about evil--the interaction of complex forces of nature and the painful events of history, in a unique way." -- Kenneth R Silk, MD Professor of Psychiatry, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, MI

"A fascinating scientific and personal exploration of the roots of evil, filled with human insight and telling detail." -- Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor, Harvard University, and author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Stuff of Thought.

"As a forensic psychologist who has spent much of my career delving into the darkest recesses of the criminal mind, I have often wondered what roles genes and environment play in subsequent psychopathic behavior. Barbara Oakley's outstanding Evil Genes provides the answers." -- Helen Smith, PhD, author of The Scarred Heart: Understanding and Identifying Kids Who Kill

"This story is not only good science writing, it's also achingly personal, as Oakley recounts the story of her selfish sister and relates it to what science is revealing about the way our brains work and how genes influence even our ability to tell right from wrong. It's not often that a book about science can also break your heart - Oakley's achievement is astonishing." -- Orson Scott Card, award-winning author of Ender's Game, Enchantment, and Empire.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 459 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books (October 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159102580X
• ISBN-13: 978-1591025801
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #141,823 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

88 of 93 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tale of the Successfully Sinister, December 9, 2007

By	William Holmes "semloh2287" (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Oakley's "Evil Genes" is a compelling mix of science, history and personal experience. The catalyst for Oakley's book is the sudden death of her sister, Carolyn, an attractive woman who often acted with shocking disregard for the people around her. When Carolyn learned that her mother's boy friend was planning to take her mother on the "trip of a lifetime" to Europe, Carolyn quickly "came to visit" and ended up being the replacement girl friend who actually made the trip. Her mother died not too long after that disappointment. When Carolyn came home to vist her family after a long estrangement amid seemingly heartfelt pleas for forgiveness and reconciliation, she went to town to run some errands and wasn't seen again for five years. It later turned out she had decided to go home with a man she had met at a store. Carolyn's diary entry on the occasion of her father's death sandwiched the family's tragedy in the midst of the mundane: "cleaned up the dried parsley I acccidentally spilled. Barb called--Dad died. My request for periodontal care seemed self-serving; but apparently this will be handled through a trust fund."

Clearly, Carolyn was different from other people in her sense of the importance (or unimportance) of those around her. But why? Was it because of her upbringing? Because of a genetic predisposition toward a borderline personality disorder? Because of the polio she had suffered as a child? Or was it some combination of these factors? These are the questions that Oakley explores and struggles to answer in her highly readable book.

The science in "Evil Genes" reveals that the "successfully sinister" (also known as Machiavellians) don't just act differently from most other people--sophisticated brain scanning techniques show that their brains process information and emotions in a completely different way. Oakley weaves these fascinating findings with historical evidence to study several famous "successfully sinister" personalities like Adolph Hitler, Chairman Mao, Slobodan Milosevic, and Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling. The subtext is that people like this are all around us and that, while some are failures because of their personality defects, others manage to combine their Machiavellian personalities with valuable skills to become very prominent--and very dangerous. They are all the more dangerous because they are firmly convinced of the righteousness of their narcissistic and self-serving causes: Oakley suggests that despite the millions of deaths and other cruelties he inflicted, Chairman Mao probably believed until his dying day that he was a deeply moral and essentially good man. The fact that evil people often don't grasp that they are in fact evil is a cold comfort for the rest of us.

From a genetic and evolutionary perspective, where do these people come from? According to Oakley, borderline personalities seem to be rare in hunter-gatherer societies--accidents happen to those who are conspicuously self-serving. Oakley suggests that settled society allows the successfully sinister to prosper and multiply--historically, for example, polygyny favors the Machiavellian, both the men who ruthlessly use their power to eliminate rivals and control harems and the women who rise to the top in the resulting competition.

Oakley does a great job of exploring the "successfully sinister" personality. An equally interesting question, and one to which she devotes comparatively little attention, is why the rest of us put up with such monsters. Hitler was able to take and maintain power because the people around him were, for the most part, willing to keep him there; likewise with Mao, Stalin, Milosevic, Castro, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Ladin, and a seemingly endless list of others. And these people were loved and admired by many who simply turned a blind eye to their evil. What is it about the successfully sinister that often lulls the rest into complacency? Their charm? Their willingness to eradicate all opposition? Something else, perhaps a felt need for such people in certain times of crisis?

Interesting questions, I think, but they'll have to wait for another book for answers (or attempts at answers). In the meantime, Oakley's "Evil Genes" is a real eye-opener.

42 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating science!, May 10, 2008

By	Angela Boyter (Ellicott City, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Three or four times a year I come across a book so compelling that I bubble over telling friends about it and impulsively read passages aloud to my long-suffering husband. Evil Genes is such a book.
As the book description says, Barbara Oakley began getting really interested in what makes people evil when she read her dead sister's diaries. For many people this would be the end of the story, but, being an engineer, and therefore analytically inclined, and a linguist, and therefore verbally inclined, Ms. Oakley delved into what the latest in psychology and brain science can tell us about what goes on in the brains of really evil people. And then she wrote about it in a way that laymen like me can understand.
I probably learned more about brains and mental pathology in this book than in any single other book I have read. I can now impress my friends with terms like "polygeny" and "gaslighting." The information provided is sufficiently advanced that I even told a psychiatrist friend things he didn't know!
In addition to the pure science, however, the book contains fascinating analyses of the minds of leaders like Chairman Mao and Winston Churchill (not that she implies Sir Winston was evil) and concludes that a touch of deviance might be helpful for personal success.
Anyone with an interest in science or history is likely to find Evil Genes an unusual and fascinating read. Let me warn, however, that this IS a book of science and presents what is known at the present level of the science; it does not offer uninformed speculation. Some other reviewers seem disappointed at the lack of conclusions; they will just have to wait until science catches up with our desire for answers.

67 of 86 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Big Disappointment, March 6, 2008

By	MZ (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

I've never been so relieved to finish a book. This book was a massive disappointment, as I might have discerned from the cute title. The author starts out with an interesting thesis--one I very much wanted to learn more about--which is that personality disorders may have a genetic cause. She has done extensive reading on the matter, but her book wobbles all over the place. She spends chapter after chapter describing infamous dictators--Hitler, Mao, Stalin--but the tie-in with her theme is tenuous. She does not delve into the possible genetic causes for their purported personality disorders, aside from a little backstory about Mao's bad behavior in childhood. She gets sloppy and repetitive, referring to almost everybody as Machiavellian or quasi-Machiavellian or some such, and seems to forget that the book is supposed to be about genetic inheritance. She's also a careless and undisciplined writer who throws in annoying colloquialisms in some, but not all, sections:
"And if communism's grand progenitor, Stalin, was different than (sic) many dictatorial wannabes, it was only in his intellect and, perhaps most importantly, his `rolodex of a memory.'"
Not only is her prose sloppy, but she doesn't complete thoughts: she writes about Winston Churchill's "hyperinflated ego" as a component of his success, but then places a footnote about Churchill's "talentless son Randolph," without tying up her premise, which is presumably that Randolph inherited some, but not all, of his father's egotism, or that he had a different set of genetic or environmental characteristics--or what? The author is obviously proud of her own biography, and lapses into show-offy, folksy language, then veers back into the scholarly. There's much too much technical description about the brain and which areas correspond with which characteristics, which just slows the book down and adds nothing to the thesis.
Also, the illustrations in the book are low-resolution and sloppy, yet the book itself is beautifully typeset and printed; it seems that the whole enterprise is afflicted with some "psychopathic inconsistency."