More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 12 - April 12, 2023
Malagasy giant jumping rat, a species that sounds disturbing even without cousins shacking up with each other).
Lol
The closer the relative, the more similar their cluster of MHC genes and the more similar their olfactory signature.
Birds flying in a V formation save energy by catching the updraft of the bird in front (raising the question of who gets stuck there).
In single-round versions of PD, it’s always optimal to defect. Not very encouraging for the state of the world.
Every other strategy would always beat Tit for Tat by a small margin. However, other strategies playing against each other can produce catastrophic losses. And when everything is summed, Tit for Tat wins. It lost nearly every battle but won the war. Or rather, the peace. In other words, Tit for Tat drives other strategies to extinction.
start with Tit for Tat. Once they’ve become extinct, switch to Forgiving Tit for Tat, which outcompetes Tit for Tat when signal errors occur. What is this transition from hard-assed, punitive Tit for Tat to incorporating forgiveness? Establishing trust.
Soon the computerized game strategies were having sex with each other, which must have been the most exciting thing ever for the mathematicians involved.
I’m not convinced that a Tit for Tat reciprocity has been clearly demonstrated in other species. But evidence of its strict use would be hard for Martian zoologists to document in humans—after all, there are frequently pairs where one human does all the labor, the other doing nothing other than intermittently handing him some green pieces of paper. The point is that animals have systems of reciprocity with sensitivity to cheating.
What do females look for in a potential mate? Species B females get nothing from a male except genes, so they should be good ones. This helps explain the flamboyant secondary sexual characteristics of males—“If I can afford to waste all this energy on muscle plus these ridiculous neon antlers, I must be in great shape, with the sorts of genes you’d want in your kids.” In contrast, species A females look for stable, affiliative behavior and good parenting skills in males. This is seen in bird species with this pattern, where males display parenting expertise during courtship—symbolically
...more
in species A, females compete aggressively to pair-bond with a particularly desirable (i.e., paternal) male. In contrast, species B females don’t need to compete, since all they get from males is sperm, and there’s enough to go around from desirable males.
Interestingly, as females age, with decreasing likelihood of a future child, they become less forceful in weaning.*
Genotype = someone’s genetic makeup. Phenotype = the traits observable to the outside world produced by that genotype.
the organism is just a vehicle for the genome to be replicated in the next generation, and behavior is just this wispy epiphenomenon that facilitates the replication.
In that view, genes and the frequencies of their variants are merely the record of what arose from phenotypic selection.43
Your cake company isn’t selling enough cakes. Do you change the recipe or the baker?
Nice analogy bro
A dominates B but a group of Bs dominates a group of As. Here’s a great example of neo–group selectionism: As a poultry farmer, you want your groups of chickens to lay as many eggs as possible. Take the most prolific egg layer in each group, forming them into a group of superstar chickens who, presumably, will be hugely productive. Instead, egg production is miniscule.45 Why was each superstar the egg queen in her original group? Because she would aggressively peck subordinates enough to stress them into reduced fertility. Put all these mean ones together, and a group of subordinated chickens
...more
Despite the combination of some of our most fervent wishes and excuses, we’re neither bonobos nor chimps.
the most common cause of individual human violence is male-male competition for direct or indirect reproductive access to females. And then there is the dizzyingly common male violence against females for coercive sex or as a response to rejection.
Instead we do kin recognition cognitively, by thinking about it. But crucially, not always rationally—as a general rule, we treat people like relatives when they feel like relatives.
Remarkably, 46 percent of women would save their dog over a foreign tourist. What would any rational baboon, pika, or lion conclude? That those women believe they are more related to a neotenized wolf than to another human. Why else act that way? “I’ll gladly lay down my life for eight cousins or my awesome labradoodle, Sadie.”
One of the tools of the propagandist and ideologue drumming up hatred of the out-group—blacks, Jews, Muslims, Tutsis, Armenians, Roma—is to characterize them as animals, vermin, cockroaches, pathogens. So different that they hardly count as human. It’s called pseudospeciation, and as will be seen in chapter 15, it underpins many of our worst moments.
We’re the species with unprecedented cooperation among unrelated individuals, even total strangers; Dictyostelium colonies are green with envy at the human ability to do a wave in a football stadium.
Nice
no female has ever given birth to a member of a new species.72
“The problem was that sociobiology explained too much and predicted too little.”
Gonna use this to defame all of the soft sciences
Squid are not great swimmers compared with sailfish (maximum speed: sixty-eight miles per hour). But they’re damn good for something whose great-great-grandparents were mollusks.
Is, say, competitive infanticide a just-so story? Not when you can predict with some accuracy whether it will occur in a species based on its social structure. Nor is the pair-bond/tournament comparison, when you can predict a vast amount of information about the behavior, physiology, and genetics of species ranging across the animal kingdom simply by knowing their degree of sexual dimorphism.
It is Marx and Engels as trilobite and snail.
This is the coolestf book ever
“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.”
Merely grouping people activates parochial biases, no matter how tenuous the basis of the grouping.
As shown in studies, liberals are typically uncomfortable discussing race with their children. Instead they counter the lure of Us/Them-ing with abstractions that mean squat to kids—“It’s wonderful that everyone can be friends” or “Barney is purple, and we love Barney.”
Most common is forgiving Us more readily than Them. As we will see, this is often rationalized—we screw up because of special circumstances; They screw up because that’s how They are.
Thems do not solely evoke a sense of menace; sometimes it’s disgust. Back to the insular cortex, which in most animals is about gustatory disgust—biting into rotten food—but whose human portfolio includes moral and aesthetic disgust. Pictures of drug addicts or the homeless typically activate the insula, not the amygdala.
Thems are also frequently viewed as simpler and more homogeneous than Us, with simpler emotions and less sensitivity to pain.
Good tool to sus people out for soft dehumanization
Them must accommodate the appealing celebrity Them, the Them neighbor, the Them who has saved our ass—“Ah, this Them is different” (no doubt followed by a self-congratulatory sense of open-mindedness).
The guy’s authoritarian temperament is unsettled by novelty and ambiguity about hierarchies; this isn’t a set of coherent cognitions.
Automatic features of Us/Them-ing can extend to magical contagion, a belief that the essentialism of people can transfer to objects or other organisms.
testing things in ways that can support but not negate your hypothesis; skeptically probing outcomes you don’t like more than ones you do.
everywhere.
Our cognitions run to catch up with our affective selves, searching for the minute factoid or plausible fabrication that explains why we hate Them.
Breaking Bad
Breaking bad
while the nearest person of a different race lived thousands of miles away—there is no evolutionary legacy of humans encountering people of markedly different skin color.
And the rare transition from HH to LL—a buddy who made partner in your law firm, but then “something happened” and now he’s homeless. Disgust mingled with bafflement—what went wrong?
My ex lmao
Turning LH Thems into LL Thems accounts for some of the worst human savagery.
“At home one abuses the enemy, and draws insulting caricatures. How tired I am of grotesque Kaisers. Out here, one can respect a brave, skillful, and resourceful enemy. They have people they love at home, they too have to endure mud, rain and steel.”
Activation merely implies that the interracial nature of the interaction is weighing on the subject (implicitly or otherwise) and prompting executive control.
put Us-es and Thems together under very narrow circumstances and something sort of resembling that happens, but you can also blow it and worsen things. Some of those effective narrower circumstances: there are roughly equal numbers from each side; everyone’s treated equally and unambiguously; contact is lengthy and on neutral, benevolent territory; there are “superordinate” goals where everyone works together on a task they care about (say, the summer campers turning an overgrown meadow into a soccer field).
The trope of “poor but honest,” by throwing a sop of prestige to Thems, is another great means of rationalizing the system.
Stress can even cause your immune system to abnormally target hair follicles, causing your hair to turn gray.
fall guy.
?
Recall the study of thirty-seven countries showing that the more income inequality, the more preadolescent bullying in schools. In other words, countries with more brutal socioeconomic hierarchies produce children who enforce their own hierarchies more brutally.
the worst stress-related health typically occurs in middle management, with its killer combo of high work demands but little autonomy—responsibility without control.
