ABSTRACT
The premise of this book is that humans are fundamentally social animals, where social means processes of relating between human bodies. The argument is that over very long periods of time the processes of biological evolution have produced human bodies with distinctive characteristics. Human physiology is such that an individual body cannot regulate itself on its own because the biochemical mechanisms of calming and arousal are inextricably linked to actions of attachment to, and separation from, other bodies. Attachment actions of the body trigger releases of opioids in the brain, which calm the body, and separation actions trigger arousal hormones in the brain, which excite the body, so that humans are inevitably social at a fundamental physiological level. In the most basic way, humans have to belong together in groups and this physiological need is central to the cooperative and competitive joint action that is the basis of the survival of the human species.
