Product Description

Have you ever met a person who left you wondering, 'How could someone be so twisted? So evil?' Prompted by clues in her sister's diary after her mysterious death, author Barbara Oakley takes the reader inside the head of the kinds of malevolent people you know, perhaps all too well, but could never understand. Starting with psychology as a frame of reference, Oakley uses cutting-edge images of the working brain to provide startling support for the idea that 'evil' people act the way they do mainly as the result of a dysfunction. In fact, some deceitful, manipulative, and even sadistic behavior appears to be programmed genetically - suggesting that some people really are born to be bad. But there are unexpected fringe benefits to 'evil genes'. We may not like them - but we literally can't live without them. Oakley deftly ties together the big picture implications of revolutionary neuroscientific and genetic discoveries, showing the eerily similar behavioral tics of Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Slobodan Milosevic. The dramatic recent scientific findings presented in "Evil Genes" shed light not only on dictators far afield, but on politics at home, as well as business, religion, and everyday life. In fact, history itself has been shaped by the strange confluence of genes and environment that science is just now beginning to understand. Oakley links the latest findings of molecular research to a wide array of seemingly unrelated historical and current phenomena, from the harems of the Ottomans and the chummy jokes of 'Uncle Joe' Stalin, to the remarkable memory of investor Warren Buffet. Throughout, she never loses sight of the personal cost of evil genes as she unravels the mystery surrounding her sister's enigmatic life - and death. "Evil Genes" is a tour-de-force of popular science writing that brilliantly melds scientific research with intriguing family history and puts both a human and scientific face to evil.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #68484 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 473 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781591026655
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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
"well-written and organized and carefully researched. Even though it includes some fairly complex scientific explanations, these sections are well-written and understandable. I recommend this insightful and helpful book to anyone who deals with "difficult people" in their work or in their personal relationships." -- Living the Scientific Life, a SEED ScienceBlog, reviewed by GrrlScientist, March 27, 2009

From the Publisher
Foreword by David Sloan Wilson, author of "Evolution for Everyone."

Customer Reviews

A Tale of the Successfully Sinister
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.

Fascinating science!
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.

Big Disappointment
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."