the “human self-domestication hypothesis.” According to this hypothesis, changes in our ancestors’ material and social environment created new selection pressures in which aggressive individuals were outcompeted by friendly, prosocial ones - more specifically, by those who were friendly towards fellow “ingroup” members. This process had two important consequences. First, it allowed for immensely powerful forms of communication, coordination, and culture that constitute the secret of our species’ evolutionary success. Second, it produced a set of physical, psychological, and behavioural traits - a “domestication syndrome” - characteristic of domesticated species selected for social tolerance and low aggression. (View Highlight)
evolución homo_sapiens teoría domesticación
although evolution favours traits that maximise an organism’s fitness, organisms don’t make decisions by calculating the fitness consequences of behaviours. Instead, they act on adaptive drives, motives, emotions, and so on. In other words, the ultimateDarwinian causes of behaviours are different from their immediate (“proximate”) psychological causes. (View Highlight)
Esto es una idea muy importante que no es completamente entendida por las personas que tienen una comprensión superficial o limitada de la teoría de la evolución. “Ultimate Darwinian causes are different than psychological ones”.
evolución adaptación causa comportamiento
Roughly, natural selection favours traits that maximise an organism’s inclusive fitness. This includes its own reproductive success, but also the reproductive success of kin (i.e., those who share the organism’s genes) as weighted by their degree of genetic relatedness. Inclusive fitness is relative, however. There’s no absolute fitness target, as if any organism that reaches that target will start spawning infinitely. Evolution favours organisms that are the most successful at hoovering up energy to propagate their genes (View Highlight)
evolución concepto mecanismo nota
there’s reciprocity (i.e., “you scratch my back, I scratch yours”). Humans trade favours, often in the context of relationships in which mutual trust and sympathy are built up over long periods. Such reciprocity depends on sophisticated cognitive capacities, including the ability to track individuals through time, remember their past behaviours, and delay gratification, which might explain why it’s rare in non-human animals. (View Highlight)
cognición evolución homo_sapiens cooperación
Consider interdependence. Although often depicted in heartwarming terms, it has a harsh logic. For example, people constantly (albeit often unconsciously) estimate the degree to which they have a stake in the interests of others, and emotions such as empathy closely track such estimations. For this reason, when you don’t depend on others or they threaten your interests, your empathy tends to disappear. (View Highlight)
Because humans evolved to reap the benefits of cooperation whilst minimising its costs, the social psychology we’ve evolved to navigate such complexity is highly strategic and selective. What might superficially look like indiscriminate friendliness is rooted in subtle psychological processes that track whom one depends on, the benefits of different relationships and alliances, and the degree to which traits and behaviours are socially rewarded (View Highlight)
estrategia capital_social homo_sapiens relaciones
Once you understand that natural selection is a competitive process and that organisms cooperate not because cooperation is inherently valuable but because it promotes their fitness-relevant goals, none of this should be surprising. (View Highlight)
Once you appreciate that human beings are Darwinian organisms and that cooperation is a complex set of strategies deployed to achieve more fundamental evolutionary goals, it becomes clear that this heartwarming story is a gross distortion of human social life (View Highlight)