Science Quote by Keith Henson

A cold splash of evolutionary realism: Henson’s line treats “social games” not as harmless office-politics fluff but as a primate operating system running in the background while the hardware catches fire. The bite comes from the mismatch between scale and attention. We obsess over status, coalition, reputation, and narrative positioning because those instincts once kept our ancestors fed and protected. In Henson’s framing, those same instincts now function like a trance, consuming bandwidth precisely when clear-eyed coordination is required.

The phrase “without the least insight” is doing the moral work. It’s not that primates are malicious; it’s that the cognition needed to diagnose a slow, abstract, system-level threat is not the cognition evolution optimized. “What is killing them” is deliberately non-specific, letting the reader swap in climate collapse, nuclear risk, misinformation, pandemics, antibiotic resistance, or even the quieter deaths-by-incentive like inequality and institutional rot. The ambiguity is strategic: it suggests the killer changes, the pattern doesn’t.

As a scientist, Henson is also taking aim at a comforting modern myth: that education or intelligence reliably upgrades the species. You can have high IQ, advanced technology, sophisticated models, and still default to dominance rituals and tribe-signaling when stakes rise. The quote works because it’s diagnostic and accusatory at once: it implicates the reader in the “games,” then asks whether our most polished social performances are just denial with better lighting.