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3.92 AVERAGE
3.92 AVERAGE
I first thought that this book was simply suffering from being two decades old, but Matt Ridley's much better 'The Origins of Virtue' was actually published during the same period, and does a much better job providing insights as well as being conciliatory where Wright is dismissive. Still, a strong book that would've been better in a slightly brighter tone of voice.
Not a huge fan of how he used Darwin's life to organize this book. It was a little distracting and it didn't seem to work for me.... but I did find this really fascinating. It is a LOT of information to take in though, which is why it took me almost 2 years to read. I do feel like I will revisit this and read chapters here and there so I can chew on this information more. I am so fascinated by evolutionary psychology, and this was a great deep dive into it... just don't expect to read this in one week.
This book is fucking amazing. I cannot think of anything else I have read that has more real-world implications than this book—ever.
Read it.
Read it.
The pace and language of this book felt so pedantic to me. I had trouble understanding half of what I was reading. There were some instances when I felt like I understood what the author was saying, but for the most part I just felt lost and confused. This was just not for me, personally, despite the fact that I’ve tried to push through as much as I could.
I read it twice. I don't agree with everything in this book but I think it is very well done.
Really fun read.
Wright does it well. My copy is all marked up.
I'll give you three ideas that stuck with me:
1. A saint is someone who knows that everything he does is egotistical (an idea Wright paraphrased from Martin Luther).
2. Science is privy to our inner workings, we are not. It makes more sense for our mind to tell stories to us about what we are rather than the truth.
3. We can be sad that traits like empathy and love exist because of their roots in self interest, OR we can appreciate them, because they do not have to exist at all, no matter their roots.
Oh, and do a favor for me. Take off your shoes and sit down on the ground. Be with your feet. Google images of ape feet. Think about how weird this all is.
Wright does it well. My copy is all marked up.
I'll give you three ideas that stuck with me:
1. A saint is someone who knows that everything he does is egotistical (an idea Wright paraphrased from Martin Luther).
2. Science is privy to our inner workings, we are not. It makes more sense for our mind to tell stories to us about what we are rather than the truth.
3. We can be sad that traits like empathy and love exist because of their roots in self interest, OR we can appreciate them, because they do not have to exist at all, no matter their roots.
Oh, and do a favor for me. Take off your shoes and sit down on the ground. Be with your feet. Google images of ape feet. Think about how weird this all is.
informative
medium-paced
In a reciprocally altruistic manner I will give this book five stars for the knowledge its has bestowed upon for I can invest it to become a alpha male of the concrete jungle. With a book like this there is some much information, so much of it are moral situations in which we have been at one point or another.
In these situations Wright uses a plethora of research to give evolutionary perspectives as to why these mechanism have evolved. The to tangibly visualize the point he relates this to Darwin’s life. Yes, this man literally applied Darwinism to “Chuck” .
Basically read this book if you want to know why you girlfriend left you for the 6’2 up and coming valuable male that has good genes while she is a the end of her reproductive window at 29 years old. Meanwhile you though everything was great and she still “loved” you but she did have a few weird signs the last few weeks. Well for the next time... you know why before you wondering why you are making ramen.
In these situations Wright uses a plethora of research to give evolutionary perspectives as to why these mechanism have evolved. The to tangibly visualize the point he relates this to Darwin’s life. Yes, this man literally applied Darwinism to “Chuck” .
Basically read this book if you want to know why you girlfriend left you for the 6’2 up and coming valuable male that has good genes while she is a the end of her reproductive window at 29 years old. Meanwhile you though everything was great and she still “loved” you but she did have a few weird signs the last few weeks. Well for the next time... you know why before you wondering why you are making ramen.
A book worth reading. It helped me understand several things.
The parts on sex are quite depressing. Ideally you should read this in parallel with Sex at Dawn to emphasise that 1) you can drawn very different conclusions from the available data on sex, so you shouldn't trust the conclusions you do come to, 2) things aren't necessarily as depressing as they are presented in The Moral Animal, 3) sex is more complicated than you would expect.
What follows are disorganised notes. Some of the notes make morally objectionable claims. I don't necessarily believe any of what follows, I'm simply recording the claims in the book I found remarkable.
The Origin of Species was written in the same year as Smiles' "Self Help" on mastering your vices and Mills "On Liberty"
Evo psych emerged as a paradigm shift in the 1970's onward
Not much progress was made on understanding human behaviour between Darwin and "The Selfish Gene".
As Puppets of natural selection our best hope of happiness is to decipher the ends of the puppeteer
Darwin was kind, modest, not especially intelligent (so he claimed) or ambitious.
We are adapted for our EEA: environment of evolutionary adaptation
Landmark book: "Adaptation and Natural Selection: Critique of some current evolutionary thought"
Bateman Williams Trivers
Trobirians: have not made the connection between sex and reproduction. Early adolescents are encouraged to have sex with a range of partners. This is found with some other pre-industrial cultures, but the experiment normally ends before fertility.
Examples of male keenness: homosexuality is rampant in frogs, spiders often try to mate with dead females, turkeys will enthusiastically court a stuffed turkey replica or even a wooden replica head suspenedded above the ground
Species where the male plans a more active role in raising offspring have less choosey females and more choosey males (sea horses, sea smipos, mormon crickets, poison arrow frogs)
Female chimps will resist rapists because it is in their genes' interest to have offspring who are themselves competent rapists
"Female resistance should be favoured by natural selection to avoid having a son who is an inept rapist"
This doesn't mean the female "really wants it". If she did she would put up less resistance Thus the and the individual are at odds.
Male turkey trying to mate with fake female turkey head is approximately the same as a human getting excited by a 2D representation of a naked female
The early sociobiologists were accused of being closet social Darwinists, which could explain why so little progress was made in the field for so long
The females in some species demand a gift for copulation. There is a kind of spider where the female needs a fly to eat during copulation. If she finishes the fly she wanders off. If he finishes first, he takes the fly bakc for another date.
For a high MPI (male parental investment) species like humans, males' main strategy is to have a steady relationship, but there is still the secondary strategy of seeking opportunistic sex for offspring which will not divest resources
"How smart would someone have to be for you to date them?" Men and women: average
"How smart would they have to be to have sex with them?" Men: below average, Women: above average
Men are more concerned with sexual infidelity (loss of access to baby making)
Women are more concerned with emotional infidelity (loss of resources)
Females may be promiscuous for the purposes of resource extraction (gifts for sex), or for muddying the waters of who the father is so that more men will be obliged to assist with child care.
Sperm count in ejaculate goes up with how long his partner has been out of his sight, not how long he has been without sex
The Madonna/whore dichotomy: if a woman is easy to sleep with, then it is worth doing so, but not worth investing in (because she will sleep with some other guy) so is not wife material
Frequency dependent strategy (first described by John Maynard Smith) e.g., Hawk and Dove. There is a stable state of frequencies
Good looking females have a good chance of marrying up, so will have a tendency to have few sexual partners to preserve their Madonna-desirability
Attractive males on the other hand tend to have more sexual partners
Women put more emphasis on looks when they don't expect a relationship to last. Trade-off of parental investment for good genes.
Over time, the cost of desertion remains the same for husband and wife (harm to their child), but the benefits of desertion decrease for the wife compared to the husband. The husbnad can find a new young wife wwho will provide another 20 years of reproduction.
You can make a case for strong monogamy and strong polygamy, but the current situation of serial monogamy/de-facto polygamy is the worst of both worlds. When will a man love a child? a) when there is strong monogamy he can be sure it is his child, b) if he is regularly sleeping with the mother and there is a decent chance he is the father. If there is serial monogamy then he can be sure it is not his child and so there will be less parental love in the society.
Men who develop low self esteem (or self evaluated low market value) by adolescence and this often doesn't change if the man becomes high status later in life. This happened with Darwin. Why? Maybe because career climbing options like education weren't available in the EEA. Perhaps because choosing an attractive mate will make you more open to being cuckolded by someone good-looking and athletic
Feminists insistence in symmetry between the sexes may have led to more respect for women as colleagues, but less respect for women as sexual conquests rather than pure creatures which should be protected from corruption and employed as a model for chastity
Any sexual morality will have costs. We can only try to distribute the costs evenly among and between men and women.
Theorists of social psychology perhaps need unusually harsh standards of self-criticism as their ideas will inevitably be used to justify policy
William Hamilton originated the ideas of kin selection, selection in the gene level
Siblings will share much more than half their genes, but new/novel genes will be in about half of siblings
Males can more efficiently convert wealth to offspring, but females can more reliably get mates. Thus wealth correlates with favouring sons over daughters. Female infanticide more common in the upper class, wealth generally passed to sons rather than daughters. Also seen in breast feeding patterns and how long before another child is had in North American families.
At one stage Darwin was obsessed with Barnacles. When one of his sons went to a friends house he asked "where do you keep your barnacles?"
Some cultures appear not to have status but upon closer inspection do. In one, meat is shared by hunters in a collective pool, but the best hunters have more affairs and more offspring
Why status? Pecking order prevents costly fights which are likely to be lost. But humans sort themselves into hierarchies more than seems reasonable. Humans only one year old will sort themselves into hierarchies.
High status high seratonin
Low status more likely to cheat
The parts on sex are quite depressing. Ideally you should read this in parallel with Sex at Dawn to emphasise that 1) you can drawn very different conclusions from the available data on sex, so you shouldn't trust the conclusions you do come to, 2) things aren't necessarily as depressing as they are presented in The Moral Animal, 3) sex is more complicated than you would expect.
What follows are disorganised notes. Some of the notes make morally objectionable claims. I don't necessarily believe any of what follows, I'm simply recording the claims in the book I found remarkable.
The Origin of Species was written in the same year as Smiles' "Self Help" on mastering your vices and Mills "On Liberty"
Evo psych emerged as a paradigm shift in the 1970's onward
Not much progress was made on understanding human behaviour between Darwin and "The Selfish Gene".
As Puppets of natural selection our best hope of happiness is to decipher the ends of the puppeteer
Darwin was kind, modest, not especially intelligent (so he claimed) or ambitious.
We are adapted for our EEA: environment of evolutionary adaptation
Landmark book: "Adaptation and Natural Selection: Critique of some current evolutionary thought"
Bateman Williams Trivers
Trobirians: have not made the connection between sex and reproduction. Early adolescents are encouraged to have sex with a range of partners. This is found with some other pre-industrial cultures, but the experiment normally ends before fertility.
Examples of male keenness: homosexuality is rampant in frogs, spiders often try to mate with dead females, turkeys will enthusiastically court a stuffed turkey replica or even a wooden replica head suspenedded above the ground
Species where the male plans a more active role in raising offspring have less choosey females and more choosey males (sea horses, sea smipos, mormon crickets, poison arrow frogs)
Female chimps will resist rapists because it is in their genes' interest to have offspring who are themselves competent rapists
"Female resistance should be favoured by natural selection to avoid having a son who is an inept rapist"
This doesn't mean the female "really wants it". If she did she would put up less resistance Thus the and the individual are at odds.
Male turkey trying to mate with fake female turkey head is approximately the same as a human getting excited by a 2D representation of a naked female
The early sociobiologists were accused of being closet social Darwinists, which could explain why so little progress was made in the field for so long
The females in some species demand a gift for copulation. There is a kind of spider where the female needs a fly to eat during copulation. If she finishes the fly she wanders off. If he finishes first, he takes the fly bakc for another date.
For a high MPI (male parental investment) species like humans, males' main strategy is to have a steady relationship, but there is still the secondary strategy of seeking opportunistic sex for offspring which will not divest resources
"How smart would someone have to be for you to date them?" Men and women: average
"How smart would they have to be to have sex with them?" Men: below average, Women: above average
Men are more concerned with sexual infidelity (loss of access to baby making)
Women are more concerned with emotional infidelity (loss of resources)
Females may be promiscuous for the purposes of resource extraction (gifts for sex), or for muddying the waters of who the father is so that more men will be obliged to assist with child care.
Sperm count in ejaculate goes up with how long his partner has been out of his sight, not how long he has been without sex
The Madonna/whore dichotomy: if a woman is easy to sleep with, then it is worth doing so, but not worth investing in (because she will sleep with some other guy) so is not wife material
Frequency dependent strategy (first described by John Maynard Smith) e.g., Hawk and Dove. There is a stable state of frequencies
Good looking females have a good chance of marrying up, so will have a tendency to have few sexual partners to preserve their Madonna-desirability
Attractive males on the other hand tend to have more sexual partners
Women put more emphasis on looks when they don't expect a relationship to last. Trade-off of parental investment for good genes.
Over time, the cost of desertion remains the same for husband and wife (harm to their child), but the benefits of desertion decrease for the wife compared to the husband. The husbnad can find a new young wife wwho will provide another 20 years of reproduction.
You can make a case for strong monogamy and strong polygamy, but the current situation of serial monogamy/de-facto polygamy is the worst of both worlds. When will a man love a child? a) when there is strong monogamy he can be sure it is his child, b) if he is regularly sleeping with the mother and there is a decent chance he is the father. If there is serial monogamy then he can be sure it is not his child and so there will be less parental love in the society.
Men who develop low self esteem (or self evaluated low market value) by adolescence and this often doesn't change if the man becomes high status later in life. This happened with Darwin. Why? Maybe because career climbing options like education weren't available in the EEA. Perhaps because choosing an attractive mate will make you more open to being cuckolded by someone good-looking and athletic
Feminists insistence in symmetry between the sexes may have led to more respect for women as colleagues, but less respect for women as sexual conquests rather than pure creatures which should be protected from corruption and employed as a model for chastity
Any sexual morality will have costs. We can only try to distribute the costs evenly among and between men and women.
Theorists of social psychology perhaps need unusually harsh standards of self-criticism as their ideas will inevitably be used to justify policy
William Hamilton originated the ideas of kin selection, selection in the gene level
Siblings will share much more than half their genes, but new/novel genes will be in about half of siblings
Males can more efficiently convert wealth to offspring, but females can more reliably get mates. Thus wealth correlates with favouring sons over daughters. Female infanticide more common in the upper class, wealth generally passed to sons rather than daughters. Also seen in breast feeding patterns and how long before another child is had in North American families.
At one stage Darwin was obsessed with Barnacles. When one of his sons went to a friends house he asked "where do you keep your barnacles?"
Some cultures appear not to have status but upon closer inspection do. In one, meat is shared by hunters in a collective pool, but the best hunters have more affairs and more offspring
Why status? Pecking order prevents costly fights which are likely to be lost. But humans sort themselves into hierarchies more than seems reasonable. Humans only one year old will sort themselves into hierarchies.
High status high seratonin
Low status more likely to cheat