Will
@Evolving_Moloch
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Evolutionary Anthropology. RA @HSB_Lab . Blogs on violence, magic, rituals, deception.
Joined December 2016
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New open access paper - 'A Deceptive Curing Practice in Hunter-Gatherer Societies', exploring what I suspect is one of the oldest and most widespread healing practices/'magic tricks' in the world
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I have long thought that if pretty much anyone other than Mel Gibson had made Apocalypto it would be more widely hailed as a masterpiece and considered relatively pioneering in terms of representation in Hollywood films. Great movie, and the entire film is spoken in Yucatec Maya.
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@50mi_elbowroom
Just one thing to note since some people in the comments and QTs seem confused is that this wasn't everyday wear but ceremonial and involved impersonating different kinds of spirits.
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My most centrist and self-righteous opinion is that large numbers of supremely intelligent people on all sides of the political spectrum are wasting their considerable intellects by immersing themselves in toxic and often trivial culture war psychodrama.
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A great benefit of reading lot of ethnography is realizing 1) a lot of things people blame on capitalism or agriculture are found in non-capitalist, non-agricultural societies, but also 2) a lot of what people attribute to ‘human nature’ are non-universal Western/industrial norms
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"Although many adults would prefer to believe that boys like weapons and fighting enemies because they are pressured into it by society, the evidence suggests that this is not true."
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The class was just you and a bunch of outgroup members and they all happened to fit precisely the caricature you wanted them to? That was quite fortuitous.
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2003 report of a 40 yr old Mexican woman, living in a small village 8 hours from hospital & unable to deliver vaginally during difficult labor, who, "using her skills at slaughtering animals...took 3 small glasses of hard liquor &, using a kitchen knife," gave herself a C-section
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Coppola on Apocalypse Now and 'anti-war' films.
great example of how so often w/media ppl like me on the left can be like “what an exhilarating commentary on the futility of these men and all their firepower, clearly speaking to america’s involvement in Vietnam etc” while the actual cultural impact is “fuck yeah that’s badass”
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Only exaggerating slightly when I say that nearly everything worth knowing about human behavior can be found in 100 year old books that are freely available on , and these works are mostly avoided by modern anthropologists.
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"man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun"
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I wrote an article for Quillette on how a number of well-intentioned anthropologists and media commentators have perpetuated a misleading portrayal of life in many hunter-gatherer societies.
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Many in the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ have been complaining about anonymity on Twitter for years, sometimes using entirely made up evolutionary and historical justifications for why it should be banned. One of their most ‘dangerous ideas’, I think.
I am increasingly convinced that Twitter anonymity is the refuge of scoundrels and fiends. Say it and stand behind it or hold your tongue.
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Women in many traditional societies all over the world not uncommonly breastfed unweaned animals
The phenomenon of treating your pets like “babies” only began after the invention of the birth control pill.
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Where are the matriarchies? - "Today anthropologists generally agree that cases of true matriarchy do not exist in human society, and that they most probably never have."
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Gambino crime family after watching The Godfather: "All our friends were watching it...the guys who came to the house were all acting like Godfather actors, kissing and hugging even more than they did before and coming out with lines from the movie."
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7 year anniversary of this great post by the late Marshall Sahlins - ‘Where Have All the Cultures Gone?’
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@FilmUpdates
It's crazy how much sequels and shared universe stuff tends to dominate the box office. Nope was good, glad to see a solid original film doing well.
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One of those ideas, like ‘romantic love was invented in France in the Middle Ages’ or ‘Ancient Greeks couldn’t see the color blue’, that is so ridiculous only an academic could believe it.
"Loneliness needs to be understood [...] as a relatively recent invention, dating from around 1800."
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What if good societies are not actually made, but are instead the undirected result of a chaotic accumulation of norms and institutions that developed mostly by chance, and are largely outside of anyone's control?
hey guys imagine if we tried to make a society that was good
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We have tons of ethnohistorical evidence showing what contemporary hunter-gatherers actually do in such circumstances. It doesn’t fit any neat or tidy ideologically comforting generalization though so it’s mostly ignored in favor of speculation from ambiguous archaeological data.
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Most hunter-gatherer societies don’t have prostitution but the majority of them have healers/shaman, who are not uncommonly the only specialist occupation within their society and receive payment for their services, so I think that’s a better candidate for the oldest profession.
it’s the oldest job on the face of the damn earth. what generation was not comfortable???? y’all truly just be talking.
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Jared Diamond’s biggest critics are left wing people who complain that he’s racist and right wing people who complain that he isn’t racist
Greetings! For my first post of the year (sheesh), I've decided to do something incredibly silly by defending Jared Diamond's *Guns, Germs, and Steel* against its critics... nearly all of them. Enjoy!
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I bet people change their minds all the time as a result of the information they encounter--and interactions they have--on this platform, it just usually happens over time and isn't the result of a single tweet.
Quick reminder: none of your tweets have ever changed a single person's mind about anything
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Worth noting most Native societies didn’t practice human sacrifice anywhere near scale of the Aztecs. Most human sacrifice in North America I’ve come across would be 1 or 2 slaves at a chief’s funeral—& similar retainer sacrifice existed historically in every region of the world
If people are curious what the Americas looked like before the colonizers got there:
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Something a lot of people aren’t aware of is that there are hundreds of documented hunter-gatherer societies in the ethnohistorical record, yet the generalizations people—including anthropologists—make about ‘hunter-gatherers’ come from descriptions of like three or four of them.
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@itsbirdemic
"unobtrusively assessed by two male experimenters who were standing in front of the participants while they were filling out the questionairre." just me and my bro, playing "hot or not", for science, you know.
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Since it is the end of the year, here is a very long and self-indulgent thread on all the articles I wrote over the last 12 months
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1) H sapiens had fire making tools & technology to process animal skins before even leaving Africa 2) multiple archaic Homo species made it to Siberia 3) dying of thirst in areas of Kalahari where there’s no surface water probably even more ruthless & novel environmental pressure
To me, the core truth of the cold winters theory is this: humans in places where temperatures get lethally cold all die, 100%, unless they figure out ways to stay warm. There’s no other comparably ruthless environmental demand.
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FYI literally none of the studies in this article actually show that, all of the research cited are based on the assumption that strong priming effects are real (debatable), and the sample sizes are comical in some cases (ex. n=13).
FYI: Becoming rich and powerful actually damages the empathy parts of your brain in such a way that you are physically less capable of caring about other people.
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Except most clothing production throughout history was done by women, and this is particularly important in areas where clothing was necessary for thermoregulation (e.g., the arctic). Actually quite common for women to create the shelters across various foraging societies as well
Let me see if it makes any more sense to people this way...
Masculinity creates stuff. Chopping wood, building homes, drilling for oil, farming food... that's all masculine behavior.
Femininity consumes stuff and transforms it. Homemaking, childbirth, decoration, nurturing...
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I'm not speaking of any discipline in particular here, but If you're in a field that lacks methodological rigor, is highly politicized, activist-oriented, and ideologically homogeneous, this seems like it would be a good excuse to hand-wave away any criticism.
Good morning. All research is political. Have a great day everyone! ☀️
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My personal view is that if you're going to make claims about what hunter-gatherers do, you should at least reference a few actual hunter-gatherer societies, instead of just ignoring them completely and going off of gut instinct. Not a single one even obliquely alluded to here.
Hunter-gatherers didn’t coddle their kids — or abandon them to be parented by screens |
@HeatherEHeying
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I think this Vox video on monogamy is terrible in pretty much every way, but it really hits its nadir when it implies that the concept of sexual selection was just a conspiracy invented by Victorian male scientists to justify monogamy (at 13:26)
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Agriculture emerged gradually and independently across various populations within a relatively narrow latitudinal band at the end of the Last Glacial Period, so climate related factors seem like a better explanation to me
a while ago people were asking how come it took humanity so long to develop agriculture etc. i suspect the answer is basically this. innovations are deviations which threaten the prevailing social order and so they tend to get put down
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You gotta be dumb as shit to take these numbers at face value.
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Most first marriages across recorded hunter-gatherer societies are arranged marriages where young girls (avg: ~14) r exchanged for goods or labor from older husband and/or his kin. Lot of evolutionary accounts of human mating out there that don't recognize implications of this
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I tend to think many anthropologists and historians are too skeptical of the ability to make broad cross-cultural generalizations while many economists and psychologists aren’t skeptical enough of the ability to do so.
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Well, the claims in the image about art are false, the claims about agriculture are false, the claims about musical instruments are false, not to mention the bow and arrow, one of the most enduring and successful technologies in human history, was invented in sub-Saharan Africa.
A few uncomfortable truths:
IQ is genetic. It’s the “intellectual horsepower” of your body
It’s heritable. A low IQ parent likely has a low IQ child
Low IQ is linked to low impulse control
IQ varies (average) across races
WORST - Low IQ people can’t comprehend they’re low IQ
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"...tall men are more likely than short men to sponsor rituals, be wealthy, have many girlfriends, and become village chiefs. It is they, to the near exclusion of the short, who monopolize the positions of power and influence that are intertwined with the concept of masculinity."
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I think it’s pretty clear there’s enough cross-cultural consistency in gender roles to demonstrate evolved bio. sex differences matter, while there’s also enough diversity in gender roles to demonstrate sex differences not the only relevant factor & lot of other things matter too
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People who digitize old public domain books are the real heroes in this world.
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'Hi human evolution expert here! You evolved to purchase dumb bullshit and cheat on your spouse, now buy my book on polyamory and check out my Okcupid profile you fucking idiot'
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@w_i_s_t_f_u_l
@50mi_elbowroom
Uttermost Part of the Earth (1948) by E. Lucas Bridges
The Indians of Tierra del Fuego (1928) by Samuel Lothrop
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"They did not accept naively the white man's evaluation of himself as superior; actually, they considered themselves to be superior to whites..."They pity our want of skill in hunting and our incapacity for travelling through their immense forests without guides or food.""
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Tattooing has been widespread across traditional societies historically—in some ways the decline of tattooing during modern history is perhaps a bigger puzzle than its reemergence
Why is the world turning into a circus sideshow?
Visibly tattooed people used to be a freak show attraction.
(In the past, respectable people sometimes had discreet hidden tattoos.)
"The Tattooed Greek Prince" captured by Chinese Tartars and tattooed against his will:
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Crazy how many social scientists when they do ‘evolutionary’ speculation will literally just *make shit up* about how our 'hunter-gatherer ancestors' lived, while evincing absolutely zero interest in understanding how contemporary hunter-gatherers live, & tons of people buy it
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You really gotta feel for Eric Weinstein. The guy unified physics or something years ago, and instead of praising him for such an accomplishment people were all like 'Hey, you should write it up so we can check your work', and so he was all like 'fuck you, I'm starting a podcast'
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The important thing to remember is that every set of beliefs held by outgroup members is a 'religion' or 'cult', while the various assumptions and prejudices you and your friends share about the world are just the result of your dispassionate devotion to facts and logic.
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The hysterical moralizing about the Aztecs by 21st Euro-Americans is very strange to me. Pretty much the mirror image of how extremely woke people talk about European & American history, but somehow even dumber & more pointless, since it's totally divorced from any real interest.
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In early modern Germany "Executioners, skinners, grave-diggers, shepherds, barber-surgeons, millers, linen-weavers, sow-fielders, latrine-cleaners & bailiffs were among the "dishonorable" by virtue of their trades. This dishonor was...inherited, often through several generations"
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Happy 4 year anniversary to my blog. The layout may be simple, my output may be slow, the traffic may be poor, & it may not net me any citations or make me any money or anything, but at least it, well...uh...a-at least i-it's there you know, it uh...exists
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I maintain that one of the most important, under-appreciated, and under-theorized cross-cultural patterns is the tendency of men to put on disguises and impersonate nonhuman or metahuman entities
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Unless you're here for an endless barrage of ethnic and sexual resentment and the most braindead culture war conflict imaginable this place is far and away the worst it's ever been.
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Every time I see someone from the Intellectual Dark Web tweet I think of that scene from American Psycho where Christian Bale is having sex with the prostitute and he's flexing and staring at himself admiringly in the mirror. Like every tweet is the equivalent of that.
Current Leaders of the alt-right, the patriarchy & White Supremacy in the US according to MSM:
@benshapiro
@RealCandaceO
@AndrewYang
@RubinReport
Why, you ask? Because taking all their traits together you could stitch together a straight white Christian male.
#intersectionality
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I still struggle to understand how anthropologists can describe societies where young girls (~8-14) are forced into marriages with little say in the matter as having "balanced gender relations" or 'gender equality'.
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The guy goes around learning languages, including ones with few speakers left, volunteering at places, learning about people's cultures, talking with them and making them happy, and finally keeping people's home's clean for work. Way more useful to the world than almost anyone.
Is it rude to say he should’ve contributed more to the world with his life?
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Evo psychologists tend to argue conceptions of beauty do not vary greatly from culture to culture--while this may be true for some aspects/traits, I think the substantial diversity of body modification practices historically & cross-culturally also suggests otherwise in some ways
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I have a new piece on intersexual conflict and male dominance across human societies, focused particularly on the ways violence and coercion are used by males to control female sexuality and increase their own reproductive success
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In every region of the world there are examples of men forming secret societies where they use disguises and impersonate spirits to exercise social control over women and children. One of the most fascinating ethnographic patterns, yet under-explored in the evo social sciences.
Similar examples of male cult trickery in different hunter-gatherer societies. Aleut of Alaska, Yaghan of Tierra del Fuego, Hadza of East Africa, and Arunta of Central Australia
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Reading Lynn's book and seeing him seriously argue that adult Kalahari hunter-gatherers have an IQ of 54, same as 8 year old European children, really started to elevate my skepticism about a lot of these sorts of comparisons and the cross-cultural validity of some of these tests
Are there 'race' differences in intelligence? Evidence supposedly comes from 'national IQ' datasets, but when you look at the data...there's a problem:
‘National IQ’ datasets do not provide accurate, unbiased or comparable measures of cognitive ability
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Napoleon Chagnon tried to get around Yanomami naming taboos to collect geneologies, and they tricked him in a pretty hilarious fashion
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2 things I think Pinker is incontrovertibly right about: 1) modern nations have significantly lower rates of violent death as % of pop. than most other recorded societies throughout history, 2) poverty n its proxies (ex. mortality) have declined significantly in recent decades.
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One of my most dogmatic convictions is mild hostility to the 'parenting doesn't matter' narrative, there is nothing u can do to convince me that my dad reading me The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings when I was young did not have an enduring impact on my love of reading to this day
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Twitter is a good illustration of how many people's interest in science, history, etc extends only so far as they can use it as ammunition to trash other people and groups that they don't like.
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"In our sample 19.3% of all adult men had killed another person."
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This is one of those things where even if I was the only person in the world who seriously believed this (I'm not, but even if I was) it would not reduce my confidence one iota that it is correct.
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Found out today that my Dad died. He was the most reliable and secure part of my life, always gave me good advice and perspective and was there when I needed him. He taught me a lot, I’m really gonna miss him
Really grateful for my relationship with my Dad. Great man who has always been supportive of me, one of the few things that keeps me going.
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Hot take but I think narrative in film is critically overvalued & stuff like cinematography, shot composition, music, sound etc critically undervalued because most film critics studied stuff like English lit & creative writing. If more critics were artists/musicians it’d be diff.
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New preprint critiquing claims that aspects of human male morphology evolved through selective pressures related to punching. Surveying 32 H-G societies, I find fistfighting uncommon, while wrestling & dueling w/ weapons more salient forms of male conflict
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I find the notion that people in WEIRD societies experience "far fewer social, cultural, and economic constraints" on their behavior absurd on its face. Like yeah, surely you evolved to want to spend 8 hours a day sitting at desk, there must be a module for that.
WEIRD societies are the best place to study evolutionary psychological regularities, as they offer people the widest and most unconstrained leeway to unfold their evolved motives and behavioral tendencies. Says Satoshi Kanazawa.
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Still Ridley Scott's best. Amazing movie about about Conradian precarious masculinity and man's inability to let go of a slight
Which director started his or her career with a masterpiece?
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I really like the advertising strategy of repeatedly pandering to the intelligentsia in the middle of a global pandemic with ‘I Fucking Love Science’ style banalities. Why are educated people so susceptible to propaganda? 🤔
just gonna come out and say it: vulnerable people are always the most susceptible to propaganda, misinformation, and conspiracy, especially in times of cultural anxiety, and if there is a way to help them out of these traps, targeted self-righteous vilification isn’t it
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For all of Game of Thrones pretentions of unflinchingly portraying a dark and ugly world it is kind of jarring how glamorized the brothel scenes tend to be. In the Game of Thrones universe brothels are just where all the fit attractive people go to fuck publicly or something.
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Sexual Selection Through Mate Choice Does Not Explain the Evolution of Art and Music
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"A certain pseudo-politics of anthropological interpretation manages to express its solidarity with indigenous peoples by endowing them with the highest Western bourgeois values." - Marshall Sahlins
“Bregman presents hunter-gatherer societies as being inherently peaceful, antiwar, equal, and feminist likely because these are commonly expressed social values among educated people in his own society today. This is not history but mythology.”
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Probably the most important one would be the bow and arrow, one of the enduring technologies in all of human history, still in use today. Decorative beads and tattooing are two other probable examples that stand out to me.
Please name a list of inventions from the green region.
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Clear example of how sometimes 'evolutionary' explanations really can be rationalizations of preferences & prejudices (ala Gould). Hanania doesn't like tattoos, so of course we must have 'evolved' to dislike them. Meanwhile they r ubiquitous across contemporary forager societies.
Tattoos used to signal something important and unique about one's relationship with society. They showed commitment to a lifestyle. You lived by a non-mainstream code, or were a rebel who would live fast and die young. One can respect that.
Today, they signal simply that one is
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I don't think being 'humiliated' hurts him at all, I think every single time his name is mentioned he benefits, positive or negative. When your reputation is already bad & you make money through internet scams what matters is exposure--being humiliated by someone famous is useful
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I find this notion so odd because arguably most art across cultures throughout history was designed both to valorize local traditions and signal to an in-group, which are 'conservative' in that sense. Positive portrayals of ancestors, spirits, historical/mythological events, etc.
Conservatives are incapable of producing good art because they lack empathy, which means they are incapable of creating anything which communicates to a larger audience. When they try to produce art, they only end up producing clumsy in-group signaling.
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Lynn's eugenics book is fcking nuts-"The ideal for humans would be a contraceptive virus acting for about 10 years that could be given to 12-year-old boys. When they were 22, they could apply for licenses for parenthood. If they failed to obtain these, they could be vasectomized"
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@CCriadoPerez
@sophiescott
@sarahditum
@GappyTales
I thought it was a civil discussion but interpret it however you like.
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Darwin - "Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee, and spirituous liquors: they will also, as I have seen, smoke tobacco with pleasure... An American monkey, an Ateles, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus was wiser than many men."
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Hunter-gatherer disguises exhibit similarities to examples of visual deception found in other species, commonly involving strategies of animal mimicry, masquerade, background matching, or disruptive coloration, and often used to pursue prey or avoid attack
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I often think about PKD’s difficulties killing a rat
Glue traps are among the cruelest ways to eliminate rodents. They're inhumane and can be dangerous to humans and their pets.
Pleased to introduce a bill today to place a national ban on glue traps. Learn more:
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People often argue some variant of 'the nuclear family is a recent historical invention' but in many hunter-gatherer societies people seem to live primarily in nuclear households.
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I know nothing about this stuff but Internet Archive is the best website on the entire internet, I support them unreservedly and genuinely despise anyone who goes against them. I've read dozens of books I'd have struggled to find if not for them & often rely on them for research.
BREAKING: A federal judge has decided in favor of four publishers in the long-awaited copyright case Hachette v. Internet Archive. "There is nothing transformative about IA's copying and unauthorized lending of the works in the suit," the judge writes. This story is developing.
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Comments to this make me want to make this point again.
Police found 150 skulls at a "crime scene" in Mexico. It turns out the victims, mostly women, were ritually decapitated over 1,000 years ago.
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Percentage of men and women justifying intimate partner violence across sub-Saharan Africa. "Women were twice as likely to justify wife beating than men" with greater disparities where polygamy is high, and where GDP, human development and literacy are low
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