[ExI] [Extropolis] trump

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 1:16 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:>
> On Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 3:24 PM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

snip

>> > William Calvin proposed that human brain expansion was due to projectile hunting.  We are much better than chimps at accurate throwing.  Calvin makes the case that release accuracy involves a lot of the brain in parallel to get the jitter down.
>
>
> I read Calvin's book "The Throwing Madonna" more than 20 years ago but I didn't buy his theory then and I still don't. I think even a major league baseball pitcher, who is better at throwing things than 99.99% of human beings, would starve to death if he tried to make a living by throwing irregular shaped rocks at animals.

Your experience is different from mine.  A friend of mine long ago in
college could and did kill rabbits with rocks.  He was also
astonishingly good with a sling.  Calvin advanced his work on this
topic a great deal from his early book, but I can't remember which
one.

>>> >> In 1968 the conflict in Northern Ireland didn't flare up because one side was starving, the root cause was that protestants and Catholics believed in different forms of idiocy.
>>
>> > I make a case that the bleak future behavior switch is tripped in the current world by changes or anticipated changes in the income per capita.
>
> I don't think it was a coincidence that the two sides in that conflict just happened to be of different religions.
What is a religion?  What evolutionary selection, direct or indirect,
caused humans to be able to have a religion?  I think it is a side
effect of the selection for war.  YMMY, I would like to know if you
can account for religions in another way.

>> > People don't need to be starving, poor economic prospects will do it.
>
> You also said "it is a monumentally stupid move (from the gene's viewpoint) to go to war when not facing something worse" and I agree with that, but how is the smart from a genes point of view to go to war because you can only afford to buy a Chevrolet and not a Cadillac?

When this evolutionary selection was going on neither Chevrolet nor
Cadillac was part of the EEA.

>From Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War

"Further, like most psychological responses, this one is almost
certainly tripped by relative changes, here in income per capita,
(originally game and berries), especially by sharp downturns after a
long ramp-up (Cialdini 1984, p 249, quoting J. C. Davies)"

Keith

> John K Clark