[ExI] video games take 2 (Tara Maya)

[Keith Henson]

On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 11:00 AM,  Tara Maya <tara at taramayastales.com> wrote:

>> Gregory Clark makes the case that it happened as a result of strong
>> Darwinian selection in the stable agrarian north west Europe between
>> about 1200 and 1800.
>
> Maybe we aren?t talking about the same thing. Clark seems to be referring to a cultural work ethic.

Not at all.  He is talking specifically about genetic selection.
Particularly for the kind of personality traits that contributed to
the capitalist industrial revolution.

> I?m referring to the fact that life takes work.

Right, but in the particular environment that led up to the industrial
revolution, to be genetically successful you needed a set of
personality traits (which he lists) that are quite different from the
ones that were successful in previous times.

> That?s a biological feature that?s evolved as a result of strong Darwinian selection over the last 3.5 billion years.
>
> Any species that deludes itself this isn?t true will go extinct.

I kind of doubt "delusion" or even beliefs are involved here.  It's
just that people who had the personality traits to obtain modest
wealth in such an environment had far more surviving children than the
poor.  Those of us with an English (or more generally Northern
European) genetic background are very much shaped to this day by this
selection.

http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf

I strongly recommend you read it.

As some of you know, I have been very much influenced by evolutionary
psychology.  That field makes the case that a large fraction of human
psychological traits (examples, capture-bonding and those leading to
wars) were shaped in the stone age. Clark makes a case that there has
been rather recent strong selection for a list of traits.  How strong?
 The selection seems to have been as strong and persisted over a
similar number of generation as those applied to the tame Russian
foxes.

Keith