Origin: The Evolutionary Roots of Human Evil

Where does human evil come from?

Why are we capable of both extraordinary compassion and calculated cruelty? Why do we build moral systems and civilizations—yet repeatedly fall into violence, tribalism, and domination?

In ORIGIN, Bruno Rodrigues Gonçalves takes readers on a sweeping journey across deep time to confront one of humanity’s most unsettling questions: the evolutionary roots of our darker nature.

Drawing on anthropology, evolutionary psychology, history, and philosophy, this book reveals a provocative insight: human morality and civilization did not emerge by eliminating violence—but by redirecting it. The same coalitional instincts that once fueled prehistoric conflict helped forge conscience, social order, religion, states, and modern ideologies.

From hunter-gatherer bands to empires, from sacred gods to political tribes, ORIGIN traces how the human mind—shaped in ancient environments—still governs modern societies. It shows why tribalism persists, why power attracts us, why ideologies become sacred, and why the struggle between cooperation and domination remains unresolved.

Bold, unsettling, and deeply illuminating, ORIGIN challenges comforting myths about human nature and invites readers to face a difficult truth: the roots of evil are not outside us, but within the very architecture of what we are.

Understanding that origin may be the first step toward transcending it.