“Has Biology Become Our Destiny? A Critical Review of Philosophy, Evolutionary Psychology and Cooperative Behaviors” is the title of the scholarly text that Lexington Books will release in July.

“Humans evolved by contributing. Humans evolved in small-group clans, and clans had to be collaborative otherwise humans would not have evolved,” Hoffman said in a recent interview. “People have this very deep-seated need to contribute. I think the healthiest, most-productive communities are those that actually have opportunities for people to share what their skills are.”

The amiable 55-year-old looks to be the picture of good health. He’s got an athletic build and a vice-grip handshake you’d expect from a farmer.

For a while back in 1983, he held the Guinness world record for consecutive sit-ups after doing 29,051 of them.

Hoffman met with a reporter in a sun-drenched conference room of the Metro State library on Dayton’s Bluff, overlooking the St. Paul skyline. To the west, the Minnesota Capitol dome was visible in the distance.

Hoffman is in his eighth year of teaching at Metro State.

It was a life-altering move that brought him and his family here from the Los Angeles area, where he had been a life-long resident.

His interest in volunteerism and community building — both academically and in a hands-on way — grew during his 10 years as an instructor at Compton Community College.

The college, located in a tough neighborhood southeast of Los Angeles International Airport, serves predominately African-American and Hispanic students. In his first year on campus, Hoffman decided to plant some flowers outside his office.

Students took such an interest in what he was doing that he brought more flowers the next week and enlisted their help with the planting.

“I started bringing flats of flowers and plants, and more tools, and they were just getting into it,” he recalled. “Then I started coming on Saturdays … Pretty soon planting a few flowers outside my office on a weekday afternoon grew into three- or four-day community projects of planting over 300 citrus trees.”

On a recent trip back to Los Angeles, he drove through the Compton campus and was gratified to see mature, thriving trees, heavy with succulent fruit.

“The college is really an oasis of hope for many young people who have really been through some very negative, difficult personal events,” he said. “That’s really where it started for me.”

Hoffman continued to promote community service work when he arrived at Metro State.

He makes it an option for students in his classes to do 10 hours of community service in lieu of writing a research paper.

Last fall, students picked up windfall apples at an orchard in Wyoming, Minn., used them to bake pies, and served the pies to low-income families in the Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood.

The leftover apples – 3,000 pounds of them – were donated to the Five Loaves food and clothing shelter in New Richmond.

Following the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that claimed 27 lives, Hoffman led a group there to plant 50 trees and a “Victory Garden.”

Last November, another group planted trees in a blighted Detroit neighborhood.

This spring, he’ll lead students on a tree-planting expedition to St. Patrick Catholic Church’s sister parish in Yalpemech, Guatemala. A couple of months later, he’ll travel to the Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota to plant trees.

“We’re putting theory into application by participating in a variety of community-service activities,” Hoffman said.

Working with people of different ethnic, socio-economic and religious groups tends to break down the stereotypes that students may have, he said.

“They are able to really see what’s going on,” he said. “They are able to see that they have more in common with them, and that builds relationships. It reduces fear. It reduces the anger. It reduces the animosity that is essentially the seed of hate crimes and discrimination.”

The book

One of the problems with societies today, in Hoffman’s view, is that individuals and groups are increasingly isolated from each other.

“I think that contributes to some of the conflicts that we’re seeing relative to race, economics, education and so forth,” he said.

He blames some of the isolation on technology.

“More and more undergraduates consider online relationships or social media to be as meaningful as actual interpersonal engagement,” he said.

“Getting students to be a part of this process of working together cooperatively is a central theme of what I do academically. (And) it’s basically the crux of the text I just wrote.”

The book begins with a review of the ancient Greek theories of philosophy and continues on to the beginnings of modern psychology.

“I try to support the theory that cooperative behaviors have evolved to be highly productive within our society,” Hoffman said. “It’s not just a good thing that we learn to do. Humans as a species have evolved to be cooperative. So certain traits such as interdependency and cooperation are hard-wired within us as a species. Not only can we exhibit these behaviors, we need to exhibit these behaviors to avoid conflict.”

The text also explores “the numerous psychological benefits of volunteerism,” in Hoffman’s words.

“There is a psycho-physiological reciprocal benefit,” he said. “When you’re working outdoors, you’re feeling better physically. You’re more relaxed. It’s therapeutic.”

And the focus on others takes your attention off from yourself.

“The more we try to help others, the more meaning and contentment and happiness we will find,” Hoffman said. “… I call it stewardship. Working with others is just a fundamental concept of feeling good about ourselves.”

Later chapters of the book discuss aggression, gender differences, morality, empathy, revenge, forgiveness and threats to cooperative behaviors.

“Social Media, Self-entitlement and Individualistic Ideology: Key Threats to Cooperative Behaviors” is a subhead in the final chapter.

“Are we teaching people to be productive stewards of the community? Or are we teaching people to be egocentric and narcissistic?” Hoffman asked the reporter. “If you watch some of the Kardashian shows, you might tend to think that. Right?”