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April 12 - April 12, 2023
“attachment [by such an infant] to the caretaker has evolved to ensure that the infant forms a bond to that caregiver regardless of the quality of care received.” Any kind of mother in a storm. If this applies to humans, it helps explain why individuals abused as kids are as adults prone toward relationships in which they are abused by their partner.
And despite that, some individuals endure miserable childhoods just fine. More on this to come.
Pretty straightforwardly, the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood.45
Play is vital. In order to play, animals forgo foraging, expend calories, make themselves distracted and conspicuous to predators. Young organisms squander energy on play during famines. A child deprived of or disinterested in play rarely has a socially fulfilling adult life.
the opposite of play is not work—it’s depression.
Baboon mothers teach their young appropriate behavioral context; human parents teach their young what to bother dreaming about.
Thus we may be born preferring foods our mothers ate during pregnancy—pretty unorthodox cultural transmission.
Despite the charm of these findings, this book’s concerns aren’t rooted in such prenatal learning—few infants are born with a preference for passages from, say, Mein Kampf.
LMFAOOO
and these androgenized females were as interested as control females in infants. Thus, testosterone has prenatal organizational effects on some but not all behaviors.
Thus transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment.
Genes are regulated by all the incarnations of environment.
the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment.
Consider the genetic influence on voter participation; the mediating factor between the two turns out to be sense of control and efficacy. People who vote regularly feel that their actions matter, and this central locus of control reflects some genetically influenced personality traits (e.g., high optimism, low neuroticism).
If genes strongly influence average levels of a trait, that trait is strongly inherited. If genes strongly influence the extent of variability around that average level, that trait has high heritability.
Study a gene in only one environment and, by definition, you’ve eliminated the ability to see if it works differently in other environments (in other words, if other environments regulate the gene differently).
Thus a heritability score tells how much variation in a trait is explained by genes in the environment(s) in which it’s been studied.
Someone asks, “What are the effects of the gene on some behavior?” You answer, “It depends on the environment.” Then they ask, “What are the effects of environment on this behavior?” And you answer, “It depends on the version of the gene.” “It depends” = a gene/environment interaction.
it’s not meaningful to ask what a gene does, just what it does in a particular environment.
But it is just as responsible for explaining why other family members, rather than being aggressive, were flashers. In other words, there is as much rationale for going on about the “drop your pants gene” as the “warrior gene.”
bruh
Having the low-activity version of MAO-A tripled the likelihood . . . but only in people with a history of severe childhood abuse. And if there was no such history, the variant was not predictive of anything. This is the essence of gene/environment interaction. What does having a particular variant of the MAO-A gene have to do with antisocial behavior? It depends on the environment. “Warrior gene” my ass.
an abusive childhood environment—one typified by persistent uncertainty, unpredictable threat, poor behavioral modeling and social referencing, and inconsistent reinforcement for prosocial decision making—might
Bruh.
sometimes these neuropeptides are more about sociality than prosociality (in other words, boosting social information gathering, rather than acting prosocially with that information);
having the “warrior gene” variant of MAO probably has less effect on your behavior than does believing that you have it.
Ask not what a gene does. Ask what it does in a particular environment and when expressed in a particular network of other genes (i.e., gene/gene/gene/gene . . . /environment). Thus, for our purposes, genes aren’t about inevitability. Instead they’re about context-dependent tendencies, propensities, potentials, and vulnerabilities.
a female in Zambia got it into her head to go around with a strawlike blade of grass in her ear. The action had no obvious function; apparently she just liked having a piece of grass sticking out of her ear. So sue her. She did it for years, and over that time the practice spread throughout her group. A fashionista.
Frans de Waal: “culture” is how we do and think about things, transmitted by nongenetic means.
what was the most important reason cited to help someone? Among Americans it was that the person had previously helped them; for Chinese it was that the person was higher ranking; in Spain, that they were a friend or acquaintance.12
mesolimbic dopamine systems activate in European Americans when looking at excited facial expressions; in Chinese, when looking at calm expressions.
Consider a monkey, a bear, and a banana. Which two go together? Westerners think categorically and choose the monkey and bear—they’re both animals. East Asians think relationally and link the monkey and banana—if you’re thinking of a monkey, also think of food it will need.15
Wow i chose the monkey and the banana im literally korean
priming someone beforehand with individualist or collectivist cultural cues shifts how holistically he processes a picture. This is especially true for bicultural individuals.18
And in East Asia it’s all about rice.
A high incidence of 7R, associated with impulsivity and novelty seeking, is the legacy of humans who made the greatest migrations in human history.
Carrying out justice personally was viewed as a requirement in the absence of a functional legal system.
People who feel helpless don’t join organizations.
Fml
Almost by definition, you can’t have a society with both dramatic income inequality and plentiful social capital. Or translated from social science–ese, marked inequality makes people crummier to one another.
it’s not so much being poor that predicts poor health. It’s feeling poor—someone’s subjective SES
it’s not so much that poverty predicts poor health; it’s poverty amid plenty—income inequality. The surest way to make someone feel poor is to rub their nose in what they don’t have.
when inequality fuels violence, it is mostly the poor preying on the poor.
Gang violence = dxisplacement aggression
if the plane has a first-class section, there’s almost a fourfold increase in the odds of a coach passenger having air rage. Force coach passengers to walk through first class when boarding, and you more than double the chances further. Nothing like starting a flight by being reminded of where you fit into the class hierarchy. And completing the parallel with violent crime, when air rage is boosted in coach by reminders of inequality, the result is not a crazed coach passenger sprinting into first class to shout Marxist slogans. It’s the guy being awful to the old woman sitting next to him, or
...more
The human trajectory from semipermanent settlements to the megalopolis has been beneficial.
Ted kaczynski HATES him
urbanized humans do something completely unprecedented among primates—regularly encountering strangers who are never seen again, fostering the invention of the anonymous act.
in cities during the summers, for every three degree increase in temperature, there was a 4 percent increase in interpersonal violence and 14 percent in group violence.
In contrast to the centuries of food fights among philosophers, contemporary Hobbes-versus-Rousseau is about actual data.
Scathing ooooooh
being a camel herder or farmer is nearly as newfangled as being a lobbyist advocating for legal rights for robots.
HGs typically work fewer hours for their daily bread than do traditional farmers and are longer-lived and healthier.
What norms do nomadic HGs value most? Fairness, indirect reciprocity, and avoidance of despotism.
!Kung perpetually kvetch about being shortchanged on meat. It’s the background hum of social regulation.
Unintelligent design—oddities explained only by evolution. Why do whales and dolphins have vestigial leg bones? Because they descend from a four-legged terrestrial mammal. Why should we have arrector pili muscles in our skin that produce thoroughly useless gooseflesh? Because of our recent speciation from other apes whose arrector pili muscles were attached to hair, and whose hair stands up during emotional arousal.
“A chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg”—behavior
The extent to which a male primate cares for infants reflects his certainty of paternity.15 Among marmosets, who form stable pair-bonds, males do most of the child care. In contrast, among baboons, where a female mates with multiple males during her estrus cycle, it’s only the likely fathers (i.e., males who mated on the female’s most fertile day, when she had her most conspicuous estrus swelling) who invest in the well-being of the child, aiding him in a fight.
