Greedy Primates

Why do smart people keep doing stupid things?

Why do intelligent people hoard what they don't need, scroll for hours they can't afford, and watch the planet burn while arguing about last quarter's profits? The answer isn't ignorance or moral failure. The answer is evolution.

The human brain was built for the African savanna - for scarcity, small tribes, and immediate threats. We now run that ancient brain in a world of supermarkets, social media, and nuclear weapons. The mismatch is catastrophic - and almost entirely invisible to us.

Greedy Primates takes readers through evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and behavioural economics to expose the primal drives governing our modern lives - from the status obsession that fuels inequality, to the dopamine loops that hijack attention, to the tribal instincts that poison politics, to the short-term thinking that makes long-term crises feel unreal.

But this is not a counsel of despair. The final section asks the most urgent question of our time: can we outsmart our own genes? Drawing on the science of awareness, institutional design, and human cooperation, Greedy Primates argues that understanding our instincts is the first - and most powerful - step toward transcending them.

Urgent, readable, and deeply humane - this is the book for anyone who has ever asked: why do we keep doing this?