Sublime

Males without “certainty of paternity” are unlikely to stick around to pair-bond with a female and help raise the kids. Male birds tend to have high certainty of paternity, but male mammals are rarely certain at all. As a result, male mammals tend to abandon mates and offspring when—if they could just be confident of their paternity—selection would

We humans seem to have been wired by our evolutionary past to function most comfortably in a tribe of twenty to, say, eight hundred. We can push it maybe to a few thousand, even to five figures. But at some point it maxes out.

essence, we are dealing with disgruntled young people who do unexpected or dangerous things under the social influence of their peers and role models—a.k.a. the common adolescent. And yet, only a small fraction of disgruntled young people stumble into behaviors that are significantly more dangerous than making severe fashion statements or partying

scaling ratio of 3.3.

estimated that there was an upper limit at around 2,000 on the number of faces we could put names to.

Of course, most of these calculations are not conscious; we do not actually think a certain person will maximize our genetic prospects, we simply find the person attractive. So a conflict of evolutionary interests underlies the mating game. On one hand we are trying to fool others by appearing as appealing as possible, regardless of the honesty of

How’s this for rapidly altering frontal function—take an average heterosexual male and expose him to a particular stimulus, and his PFC becomes more likely to decide that jaywalking is a good idea. What’s the stimulus? The proximity of an attractive woman. I know, pathetic.[*23]

the average Homo sapiens is probably incapable of intimately knowing more than 150 individuals.