MAGA for a day — or here’s how you can really own the Libs — Key points: Schismogenesis is a term from Gregory Bateson, noted anthropologist and systems theorist. It names a ‘positive feedback loop’ that can cause societies to break apart. The term was developed as he observed how gender roles progressed in severe opposition to each other in the Iatmul people — and…

More Baked In Yumminess from Our Evolutionary Heritage — The buzz of conversation is a constant background to the camp’s activities: there is an endless flow of talk about gathering, hunting, the weather, food distribution, gift giving, and scandal. No !Kung …

Hans Gets Thrown Under the Bus — The big picture The neurotransmitter, oxytocin, both up-regulates and down-regulates empathy. It makes Us more us-like and Them more them-like. Our Us vs Them reaction is fast thinking — a knee jerk response Since it can’t be eliminated, it must be recognized, understood, and managed Failure to do so opens us up to…

An examination of the twin roots of empathy and genocidal warfare — We’re going to need a bigger boat. Love and Hate We are hard-wired for deep empathy with our ‘brothers and sisters’…even brothers and sisters well outside narrow family connections. We are hard-wired to hate and even kill anyone we feel threatens us and our people. Empathy freezes. Antipathy switches on. The same neurotransmitter…

Money is a crutch. Classical economics expresses all value in monetary terms; the opposite is true. — Increasingly, disvalues appear as the principal output of the economy, and the production of goods and services as the means to prevent being injured by these disvalues. Ivan Illich, Whole Earth Review 73 (Winter 1991) “How Much a Dollar Really Cost?” Kendrick Lamar 1) Money is a substitute where human connection fails.

Theories of Human Evolution Reading Dawkins Dawkins’ Selfish Gene carries a lot of weight. I discovered that back in 1975 when I first threw it across the room. This happened right after the opening paragraph where he dismisses all philosophy written before Darwin. I hadn’t even gotten to the ‘lumbering robots’ part twenty pages in. That…

The below is pretty meaningless with out the core story found here: good tribe / bad tribe — nerdcore mix Us vs Them is killing us. Here’s where it started.medium.com References Haystacks Simpson’s paradox — Wikipedia This result is often encountered in social-science and medical-science statistics and is particularly problematic when…en.wikipedia.org ALTRUISM IN MENDELIAN POPULATIONS DERIVED FROM SIBLING GROUPS: THE HAYSTACK MODEL REVISITED - David Sloan Wilson, Evolution. 41(5), 1987, pp. 1059–1070

Introduction This story is a sidebar to another that examines the cognitive and emotional underpinning of our extreme sociality: Good Tribe/Bad Tribe — Nerdcore Mix Controversy Unsurprisingly, the components I’ve assembled here are controversial. First, there’s been a particularly nasty shootout between kin selection and group selection proponents recently. Kin selection derives…