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September 16 - December 5, 2021
As we will show throughout the book, humans are extraordinarily well adapted to, and equipped for, change.
For millions of years we lived among friends and extended family, but today many people don’t even know their neighbors’ names.
First principles are those assumptions that cannot be deduced from any other assumption. They are foundational (like axioms, in math), and so thinking from first principles is a powerful mechanism for deducing truth, and a worthy goal if you are interested in fact over fiction.
Modern Homo sapiens arose approximately two hundred thousand years ago, the product of 3.5 billion years of adaptive evolution.
We enjoy the competitive advantage of being specialists, without paying the usual costs of a lack of breadth.
If we are to survive the future, we need multitudes of people plugging in and parallel processing.
Just as humanity broke down boundaries between niches that no other organism has broken down, so too have we broken down boundaries between individuals that nothing else has broken down so thoroughly. With regard to niches, we are a generalist species that contains individuals who are often specialists.
Conscious thoughts are those that can be communicated to others. We define consciousness, therefore, as “that fraction of cognition that is packaged for exchange.”
Rather, our individual consciousness likely evolved in parallel with collective consciousness, and would become fully realized only later in our evolution.
This model implies a few important things. When times are good, people should be reluctant to challenge ancestral wisdom—their culture. In other words, they should be comparatively conservative. When things aren’t going well, people should be prone to endure the risks that come with change. They should be comparatively progressive—liberal, if you will.
An individual and all of its descendants comprise a lineage.
This is a hard pill for many to swallow, but the truth is that culture exists in service to the genes.
Epigenetic means “above the genome.”
He describes human culture as a new primeval soup,16 in which cultural traits spread themselves much like genes do, rather than as a tool of the genome that evolved to enhance the genome’s fitness.
Asking if a particular trait is due to nature or nurture implies a false dichotomy between nature, genes, and evolution on the one side and between nurture and environment on the other. In fact, all of it is evolutionary.
Omega Principle Epigenetic regulators, such as culture, are superior to genes in that they are more flexible and can adapt more rapidly. Epigenetic regulators, such as culture, evolve to serve the genome.
From the Omega principle we derive a powerful concept: any expensive and long-lasting cultural trait (such as traditions passed down within a lineage for thousands of years) should be presumed to be adaptive.
Asking “Nature or nurture?” isn’t wrong simply because the answer is nearly always “both,” or because the categories themselves are flawed, but also because once you understand that there is one common evolutionary goal, getting precise about mechanism is less important than understanding why a trait came to be.
Put another way: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Even if a trait is transmitted partially or entirely outside the genome, we are logically justified in presuming that its broad purpose is the enhancement of genetic fitness.
the generalists—are often necessary to reveal the value of one type of specialist to another.
While actively discussed among scientists still, the broad answer is that asexual reproduction is only a win for you and your offspring if the future looks exactly like the past.5 So
Whereas most animal species exhibit male-male competition and female choice of mates, a species with partial sex-role reversal, such as we have, will also show competition between females and male choice of mates.
The differences between the sexes are found in babies, and across cultures, too—so this is not some weird WEIRD phenomenon.
Given a choice, neonate girls spend more time looking at faces, while neonate boys spend more time looking at things.37
In spite of its stodgy reputation, monogamy is the best mating system. It creates more competent adults, reduces the tendency to engage in violence and warfare, and fosters cooperative impulses.
Humans are antifragile:28 We grow stronger with exposure to manageable risks, with the pushing of boundaries.
First, except for rare, extreme examples, many people who exhibit “neurodiversity” benefit from trade-offs that allow them enhanced insight or skills in other areas.
Second, while learning differences aren’t inherently good or bad, they can serve to break bad educational relationships.
Perhaps school should serve the purpose of helping young people grapple with the question: Who am I, and what am I going to do about it? 16 Another way of phrasing this might be: What’s the biggest and most important problem I can solve with my gifts and skills? Or: How do I find my consciousness, my truest self? Done well, then, school can provide a great platform for formalizing and delivering rites of passage.
become experienced enough in the world to reliably recognize pattern, return to first principles when trying to explain observed phenomena, and reject authority-based explanations.
Adulthood, then, is the phase in which you operationalize what you have learned, and become productive.
Do this by engaging in a kind of scientific Buddhism.
