If You Have Anger or Impulse Issues, Play Sports
Or, how we have changed the way we fight and how often
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
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I’ve got a question for you. When you throw a projectile or a ball, how good is your throw?
Even if you distinguish yourself as the least able to throw either hard or accurately, you would be better than your ancestors — any ape — thanks to a series of adaptations that appeared around two million years ago and that underlie human throwing capabilities.
To appreciate how evolution made us good at throwing projectiles such as spears, consider the two key elements of a first-class throw: velocity and accuracy.
Stand up and try throwing something light and harmless like a crumpled piece of paper as hard as possible at a target. Note that the throw’s velocity comes from using your body like a whip.
If you tried hard, you stepped into the throw and then sequentially rotated your hips, back, shoulders, elbow, and finally wrist. At each joint, especially the shoulder, you generated energy that you passed on to the next joint.
Some of this energy is transferred to the paper ball at the moment of release. In turn, your ability to throw accurately is determined by how well you are able to move your arm in the direction of the throw and to release the projectile at just the right instant.
Throwing hard, accurately, and reliably is a unique human capability that requires hours of practice. Part of this skill derives from neural control, but humans unlike apes also evolved some special anatomical adaptations.
Apart from a highly mobile waist and a wrist that can flex upward, many human features that make overhand throwing possible are in the shoulders, which generate half the power in a throw. Ape shoulders are narrow and high, and the joint faces upward — all features useful for climbing.
In contrast, human shoulders are low and wide, and the joint faces sideways. This feature enables throwing humans to use their shoulders like a catapult.
In the first part of a throw, we cock the upper arm by holding it sideways and rotating it backward. This cocking motion stores up considerable elastic energy in the muscles and tissues that cross the shoulder. Then, when we unwind, the arm rotates like a spring in the opposite direction with incredible speed.
In professional baseball pitchers, this rotation can be nine thousand degrees per second, the fastest motion recorded in the human body. To finish the throw, we then extend the elbow, flex the wrist, and release the projectile.
Bottomline is this: If you ever spy an ape or monkey in the zoo preparing to lob underhand faeces in your direction, run! If, however, the animal is trying to hurl overhand with more force, you can relax because they lose any ability to aim with overhand throws.
Enough talk! On to this week’s essay. It’s about 1,600 words.
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Q: What’s the purpose of playing sports?
Sports are organised forms of play, and some like fencing and boxing make no effort to hide they are ritualised forms of fighting. But if you ever want to witness a truly blatant confirmation of the association between combat and sport, visit Florence, Italy, in June to see the Calcio Storico Fiorentino.
This competition, which dates to the fifteenth century, involves a series of matches between teams representing the city’s four quarters. People stream into stands surrounding a sand-covered arena the size of a football field. Most of the competitors are bare-chested and wear Renaissance-looking pants. The referees have swords.
For about an hour, the teams participate in what can only be described as a cross between rugby and a giant, ruthless cage fight. Each team of twenty-seven men ostensibly battle to throw a soccer-sized ball over narrow slits at each end of the field, but that involves serious brawling to help their teammates advance the ball toward the goal or prevent their adversaries from doing the same.
Apart from a few no-no’s like kicking someone in the head, these guys (women don’t participate) can do anything they can to beat the crap out of each other — including boxing, wrestling, headbutting, tripping, and choking.
With each goal scored and with every broken nose and cracked rib, the crowd cheers, “Verdi! Verdi!” By the match’s end, many of the players have blood streaming down their faces, and quite a few have already been carried out on stretchers. It is a battle.
Today, let’s talk about human aggression. More precisely, let’s talk about how human aggression is different from primate aggression and how we’ve found ways to channel our aggression by changing the way we fight and how often we fight.
We’ll also discuss the origin and the importance of playing sports (darts and bowling don’t count unfortunately, and we’ll discuss why) and what they teach us about managing our aggression. Lastly, we’ll also discuss what the expression “being a good sport” really means.
Let’s crack on!
If you ever watch a troop of baboons, you’ll see that they live in big groups with scores of males and females. Both sexes have dominance hierarchies that begin during infancy through play and then transform into recurring acts of aggression.
Violence affects both males and females, but males are usually the aggressors. Young adult males fight to become top-ranking males. In turn, dominant males spend much of their time vigorously defending their status and preventing other males from mating.
Tempers are on edge, stress levels are high, fights are frequent. Attitude and strategy matter, but victory is largely influenced by speed, strength, size, and agility.
If you spend a week with a troop of chimpanzees, our closest cousin with whom we share 98% of our DNA, you’ll observe something similar — numerous fights, some disturbingly brutal. Male chimpanzees frequently attack other males as well as females to gain dominance and control mating opportunities. Occasionally they kill.
Contrary to that, we humans are nicer. Visit a park in any town to observe a group of fellow humans, and you’ll see children playing but it is highly improbable any adults are fighting. Instead, the adults are peacefully monitoring the children, hanging out, or participating in sports like football and cricket.
Grownup humans play more than adults of other species, and we fight far less often than other primates like baboons and chimpanzees. Even the most aggressive human tribes ever studied engage in violence about 250 to 600 times less frequently than chimpanzees.
This begs the question: Are adult humans so nonaggressive because we evolved to be slow and weak compared to most animals? And have we exchanged fighting for playing, especially in the context of sports?
According to consensus, the answer is yes. We traded brawn for brains. Instead of relying on speed, power, and strength, humans evolved to cooperate, use tools, and solve problems creatively.
This widely held view is, however, only partly true. Although humans are comparatively slow and feeble, speed and strength have hardly ceased to matter. Instead, these brawny characteristics, albeit diminished, plays vital roles in large part because of the special way humans have evolved to compete physically with each other and our prey.
If you think about it, the athletes we most admire tend to be those who outcompete others according to the brawny precepts of the Olympic motto, Citius, Altius, Fortius (faster, higher, stronger).
However, if you’ve ever watched an MMA fight, you know very well that skill and attitude appear to be more important determinants of who wins than strength and speed. As the combatants struggle, they must fight with their minds as much as their bodies to overcome pain and fatigue and figure out how to win.
Yes, we are less violent on a day-to-day basis and less able to use raw power and strength than chimpanzees and other primates, but humans haven’t stopped fighting altogether. Instead, we have changed the way we fight and how often.
Humans primarily differ from other animals, especially our ape cousins, in having exceedingly low levels of reactive aggression but much higher levels of proactive aggression.
To illustrate this difference, imagine I just now rudely snatched your phone from your hands when you are in the middle of reading this essay. You might shout indignantly and take it back, but it is unlikely you will attack me.
Your brain would immediately inhibit any major act of reactive aggression. If you were a chimpanzee, however, you’d probably respond to my act with instantaneous, uninhibited violence. Unless I were the dominant male in the troop, without pausing to think, you’d give me a good thumping and retrieve your phone.
One widely reported case of this sort of reactive aggression that is only too common among chimpanzees involved an adult chimp named Travis who had spent his entire life peacefully as part of Sandra and Jerome Herold’s family.
Then, in February 2009, at the age of fifteen, he flew off the handle after one of Sandra’s friends, Charla, picked up one of his favourite toys. Travis’s immediate and savage attack left Charla with no hands and without much of her face including her nose, eyes, and lips.
Road rage is one example of how humans sometimes aggress reactively like Travis, but such incidents are rare because as children we rapidly learn to suppress these reactive instincts.
Yet nonreactive adult humans can excel at purposeful, planned forms of hostility. This kind of proactive aggression is characterised by predetermined goals, premeditated plans of action, attention to the target, and lack of emotional arousal.
Chimpanzees sometimes engage in proactive aggression, but humans have taken planned, intentional forms of fighting to new heights such as ambushing, kidnapping, premeditated homicide, and, of course, war.
Violent criminals, ruthless dictators, torturers, and other proactive aggressors can simultaneously be loving spouses and parents, reliable friends, and patriotic fellow citizens who remain utterly calm and pleasant in situations that would send a chimpanzee or a toddler into a rage. They also don’t need to be as physically powerful.
Arguably, hunting and combative sports like boxing are also forms of proactive aggression. And, importantly, these forms of planned aggression are utterly different psychologically from reactive aggression.
Almost all mammal infants play to develop the skills and physical capacities needed to hunt or fight as adults. Additional benefits of play include helping youngsters to learn or change their place in social hierarchies, to forge cooperative bonds, and to defuse tensions.
Humans are no different except our play often uses tools like balls and bats and, like dogs and a few other domesticated species, we continue to play even as adults.
In every culture, games and sports emphasise skills useful for fighting and hunting such as chasing, tackling, and throwing projectiles. Sports, even those as extreme as Calcio Storico Fiorentino, evolved from play.
It is widely acknowledged, however, that sports differ from play in one key respect: whereas play is unorganised and unstructured with no particular rules or outcomes, sports are competitive physical activities between opponents according to established rules and criteria for winning.
By this definition, some pastimes that require little strength or fitness are classified as sports including darts and bowling.
I have nothing against darts and bowling, but the traditional definition of sports excludes one fundamental and crucial characteristic: the control of reactive aggression. Even in “violent” sports like hockey and football, it is against the rules to lash out violently at an opponent.
As with war, suppressing reactive aggression and following rules are fundamental to most sports. Indeed, sports might have evolved as a way to teach impulse control along with skills useful for hunting and controlled proactive fighting.
What is more unsportsmanlike than punching an opponent who scores a goal or, even worse, punching a teammate who scores instead of you? Professional tennis players aren’t even allowed to say rude things on court.
Regardless of whether you are trying to beat your opponent to a pulp in a cage or impress the judges of a synchronised swimming competition, to be a “good sport” you have to play by the rules, control your temper, and get along with others.
Sports also foster habits like discipline and courage that are crucial for proactive aggression such as business and warfare.
If you have anger or impulse issues, play sports.
Timeless Insight
Imagine two sons.
The first one periodically reflects upon his parents’ mortality, while the second one isn’t comfortable entertaining such gloomy thoughts. He subconsciously assumes that there’s plenty of opportunity for him to enjoy his time with them.
The first son appreciates the fact that their time together is limited, and is therefore likely to be more attentive and loving than the second. He would try to take full advantage of opportunities to interact with them throughout the day.
The second son, in contrast, would be unlikely to experience a rush of delight on encountering his parents. He would fail to take advantage of opportunities to interact with them in the belief that such interactions can be postponed until later. And when he finally does get around to interacting with them, the delight he derives from their company will most likely not be as profound as the delight the first son would experience from such interactions.
While most of us spend our idle moments thinking about the things we want but don’t have, we would be much better off to spend this time thinking of all the things we have and reflecting on how much we would miss them if they were not ours.
What I’m Reading
If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt — above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.
— David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Tiny Thought
Sorting out what’s good and bad is what keeps priests, pundits, and parents busy. What keeps children and philosophers busy is asking the priests, pundits and parents, “Why?”
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋