A Talent for Friendship Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait [Hardcover]

This lively, provocative text presents a new way to understand friendship. Professor John Terrell argues that the ability to make friends is an evolved human trait not unlike our ability to walk upright on two legs or our capacity for speech and complex abstract reasoning. Terrell charts how this trait has evolved by investigating two unique functions of the human brain: the ability to remake the outside world to suit our collective needs, and our capacity to escape into our own inner thoughts and imagine how things might and ought to be. The text is richly illustrated and written in an engaging style, and will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers interested in anthropology, evolutionary and cognitive science, and psychology more broadly.

Part I. What Makes Us Human?
1. Being human
2. Baron von Pufendorf
3. Ghost theories
4. The secret lives of Lou, Laurence, and Leslie

Part II. The Archaeology of Friendship
5. Suddenly all was chaos
6. A wimpy idea
7. In the footsteps of A. B. Lewis
8. Confronting the obvious
9. The archaeology of friendship
10. The sign of the sea turtle
11. Drawing conclusions

Part III. Selfish Desires
12. Houston, we've had a problem
13. You can't get there from here
14. The wizard of Down House
15. The numbers game

Part IV. The Social Baseline
16. Animal cooperation
17. The question of animal awareness
18. Babies and big brains
19. Mission impossible

Part V. Social Being
20. Alone in a crowd
21. A state of mind
22. It's who you know
23. Bloodlust, fear, and other emotions

Part VI. Principles To Live By
24. The lady or the tiger?
25. A kiss is just a kiss?
26. Friend or Facebook?
27. What was the Garden of Eden like?
28. The strength of weak ties
29. Meet me on the marae
30. Being in a family way