it's funny... I was still thinking about the subject and was about to write that it isn't at all surprising that empathy would be a favored biological trait since it would support survival of the species... duh to me
i'm not so sure i would use 'pride' as my descriptive word of choice for human civilization... i don't have a scientific background so much of my thinking about humanity is based more upon my love for reading combined with my love for philosophy during college (ever since I love to just sit back and ponder)...
alas i fear humanity has a far ways to go to survive... i've been focused in particular upon violence for a multitude of reasons... starting, i suppose, with learning my wife had been abused... we have 4 daughters and when our first turned 5 or so i slowly began to notice a distancing of my wife ... from me and the girls... a very slow lack of physical contact... less hugs not just for me, but from her to our girls... i only see the connections in hindsight... it was a terrible time for me, wondering why my wife didn't love me anymore... one day taking a shower (and pondering ... haha) it hit me like a rock that my wife had been abused... to this day I don't know how or why i made that connection... but i talked to her later that night in bed ... and she exploded with the most gut wrenching anguish i've ever witnessed... she was sobbing in a fetal position for 2-3 hours... she was in her 40s at this point in time... turns out her grandather was having intercourse with her starting when she was 7... she is one of 9 kids... grandpa lived in the home with all of them... this conversation with my wife that I'm speaking of took place 25 years or so ago... i got her to go to therapy which she did for 5-6 years and that helped a lot, but her emotional triggers and scars are life long
meanwhile i devoted myself to reading all i could about sex abuse... and i was dumbfounded by what i learned... i was an educated and well read guy (trial attorney) so I was shocked to learn that many, many studies dating back to the early 1900s have been done all showing the same consistent result... fully 1/3rd of women report suffering significant substantial life altering sexual abuse like my wife - ONE THIRD OF ALL WOMEN
i was like... how can this exist and me - well read - not know about this? not ever heard about this? wtf ... how could something so horrible be happening for well over 100 years (and by definition almost certainly forever before that) - and yet not be THE most reported public fact every day of every year?
so, slowly over the past 25 years i've learned more and more about anti-social behavior and its origins... and sadly the role men play... i still don't fully understand how this is kept so quiet... what is absolutely true is that my wife who kept this hidden for 40 years until I pressured her, is the rule, not the exception...the studies have shown that the overwhelming majority of the women reporting abuse have NEVER told a soul... they keep their sexual triggers bottled up all to themselves ... not their husbands or their children know about their emotional hurdles and how they avoid certain smells... certain subjects... and other subtle things that trigger memories they do everything to avoid
another thing i learned is that the severe emotional outcomes have more to do with the fact that the person most often committing these acts are the father or grandfather or someone else very close and TRUSTED ... and the result is that the child is left without any strong sense of self - because they can't deal with why someone that should love them would treat them like disposable objects ... my wife has always insisted to me that she ended up with an emotional love for her grandfather stronger than for her attachment to anyone else in the household - which I think goes towards her pysche refusing to accept her grandpa would do anything bad to her
anyway, sorry for the detour, but it explains a lot of why i have spent so much time studying this (together with the fact I have four daughters I felt I needed to protect)... I still don't understand fully why this information is kept so secret... I have tried to do small things... one idea I had was to send a one page educational flyer home with each child in public school each year outlining to parents these facts - so that mom can be aware that the odds are very strong her daughters (and sons, to a lesser extent - but still there - and also primarily abused by men believe it or not) ... but I got nowhere with the schools (even though the president of the state teacher's union was at the time my sister in law... sigh)