Just to be clear (and at the risk of repeating myself), I’m not saying that social anxiety isn’t in any sense a product of natural selection. The ancestral environment—the environment of our evolution—featured lots of social interaction, and this interaction had great consequence for our genes. If you had low social status and few friends, that cut your chances of spreading your genes, so impressing people mattered, even if PowerPoint wasn’t the thing you impressed them with. Similarly, if your offspring didn’t thrive socially, that boded ill for their reproductive prospects, and hence for
...more
Does this help me have more empathy for Geoff’s desire that Jason compete despite COVID concerns (and my feelings about it)?
