Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
In a sense, tribalism and religion and the rest of it use a separate processing system. As Hamid, Atran, and their coauthors wrote, “Sacred value choices involved less activation of brain regions previously associated with cognitive control and cost-benefit calculations.”
Jacob Ward • The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back
Belyaev moved to a Siberian research institute, where he decided to test his ideas by conducting a simple breeding experiment with foxes. Rather than selecting foxes based on the quality of their pelts, as fox breeders would normally do, he selected them for tameness. Whichever fox pups were least fearful of humans were bred to create the next gene
... See moreJonathan Haidt • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Homo sapiens evolved to think of people as divided into us and them. ‘Us’ was the group immediately around you, whoever you were, and ‘them’ was everyone else. In fact, no social animal is ever guided by the interests of the entire species to which it belongs. No chimpanzee cares about the interests of the chimpanzee species, no snail
Yuval Noah Harari • Sapiens
Just a small fraction of the animal kingdom is capable of tapping into the evolutionarily modern Green state to handle problems via social solutions.
Stephen W. Porges • Our Polyvagal World
Among the required reading for all PUAs were books on evolutionary theory: The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, Sperm Wars by Robin Baker.
Neil Strauss • The Game
female mammals, and primates in particular, being able to work effectively in a social environment is much more important for their reproductive success than anything
Robin Dunbar • Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships
In a few remarkable pages of The Descent of Man, Darwin made the case for group selection, raised the principal objection to it, and then proposed a way around the objection: When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe included a great number of courageous, s
... See moreJonathan Haidt • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
to create more informed, smarter-thinking societies, public messaging needs to disentangle evidence from identity.
Alex Edmans • May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do about It
Darwin was a nativist about morality: he thought that natural selection gave us minds that were preloaded with moral emotions.