David Geary
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Modern Wisdom · How War Shaped Human Evolution - David Geary - #1172
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Would Modern Success Traits Work 50,000 Years Ago?
David Geary says some modern success traits would still work 50,000 years ago and some would not, because larger societies sort success into different classes and hierarchies. The main ones he names are military, political, entrepreneurial, and ideological. The military class, probably together with the political class, held the early advantages in Rome and other early empires. As a society grows, the entrepreneurial class becomes wealthier and competes with the political class for power. In China, as he understands it, the political class keeps the entrepreneurial class and even the military class in check. In the U.S. the entrepreneurial class is wealthier and more influential.
He likes t
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Why Can't Comfortable People Stop Chasing Status?
David Geary says full satisfaction is hard for a lot of people, because social status has a clear relation to the mortality risk of a person and of the children. Moving up a status hierarchy improved the odds of survival, and the odds the children survived, especially in a plague or a food shortage. Higher status meant lower risk. The timing of a crash is unknowable: another group might invade, a plague might hit, or a growing season might fail. The result is an arms race inside the species. A person has to keep moving up a little, as a buffer for when the bottom falls out.
The same pressure feeds social comparison. A lot of social media is flaunting and showing off, and people then compare
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Why Do Humans Want Control?
David Geary says humans want control because organizing life recreates the outcomes that once raised social status and reproductive opportunities, the same conditions that helped the human brain evolve. He does not mean a wish to be Hitler or Genghis Khan. For status competition, the aim is to move up a hierarchy. For a woman, in his account, the aim is a social network that provides support, help with children, and sometimes economic support.
He pictures the scope as concentric rings. Some people want control only of the day, the job, and friends. Others want to organize a much wider world. At either scope, control means being able to change the environment in the future so it benefits one
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Why Are Human Babies Born So Early?
David Geary says human babies are born so early because a pregnancy long enough for the infant brain to match a chimpanzee infant would last almost two years, and nobody wants to birth a two-year-old. Babies arrive premature in that sense, more dependent on care, with a longer growth period for the brain and the rest of the body.
Better tools, hunting, and pulling resources out of the environment also meant children had to learn the skills. Studies of hunter-gatherer groups, he says, show it takes a long time to become a skilled hunter or skilled at foraging, and for some of the work a person may not be an expert until about 30. The delayed stretch is the time spent learning how to succeed
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How Did War Help Build Civilization?
David Geary says war was the primary driver of the building of civilizations. Once groups compete, larger coalitions have the advantage. Nomadic raiders invading agricultural communities was a common dynamic before empires. The farming communities unite and start building defenses. The nomads then have to unite into larger, better organized groups to stay competitive. Both sides ramp up and develop new technology. As societies expand, not every man can serve in the military. Someone has to make weapons, bring in the harvest, and run markets, so the economy diversifies. The stress that produced the large groups, he says, was competition between groups.
He calls intense cooperation and intens
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Why Did Most Male Lineages Disappear 7,000 Years Ago?
David Geary says most male lineages disappeared around 7,000 years ago because organized groups of related men killed the men in the groups they expanded into. After early agriculture, male lineage diversity collapsed. At one point the record shows 17 female relatives for every one male relative, a drop he places at about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, in various places across the world. The signal is on the Y chromosome, so it has to be male kin groups. Related men in an organized group carry the same or very similar Y chromosomes. When they expand and the other group's men are killed, the other Y signature is erased. Women were usually kept. The archaeology varies, and sometimes women were kill
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Why Are Humans So Much Smarter Than Other Species?
David Geary says humans became much smarter than other species because brain expansion, new tools, and conflict between growing populations reinforced one another. Humans are unusual in brain size, in learning novel things such as reading, writing, inventing, and mathematics, and in self-awareness. The question is the subject of his book The Origin of Mind, which he is revising. He starts about four or five million years ago with early relatives that include Lucy, whose brains were only a little bigger than chimpanzees' and grew gradually. A little over two million years ago, maybe two and a half, Homo habilis, a tool maker, shows a jump in brain volume. The larger jump is Homo erectus, abou
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Who Still Believes in the Blank Slate?
David Geary says the only place you get a blank slate is among academic social scientists. Outside that group, the structure is already there. He will present the evidence and will probably pare it back a little from the first edition.
After the evidence comes either a second chapter or one basic chapter on big brain networks, like the default mode network. He will get into some details, then move on to problem solving and self-awareness. Toward the end he integrates the work with domain general intelligence, which a lot of people wonder about: the ability to learn novel information easily and the ability to draw inferences about basic patterns.
A final chapter covers how domain general ab
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Why Do Status Gaps Remain Between Men and Women?
David Geary says men focus more on status than women do, and the difference in focus is why gaps remain between the most successful men and the most successful women. Men, in his account, will trade off friends and health to move with status, and they more easily join together to finish common goals. Female groups are less efficient at the same kind of coordination.
He describes the female default as a focus on dynamics within the group rather than coordinating so the group can outdo another group. Male systems, as he describes them, are hierarchical and organized for competition against another group. About 15% of women are work-focused and status-focused and compete directly in the same h
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Why Do People Fantasize About Higher Status?
David Geary says people fantasize about higher status because gaining status historically would have reduced mortality risks for them and for their children. The default mode network generates a mental simulation of something going on in the world. On a quiet Saturday, with nothing intense on the mind, the network brings daydreams, usually self-referential images about what matters to the person. Better connections between the front and the back of the brain let people generate images on their own.
Instead of only reliving past events, the system can generate a future state, such as where someone wants to be five years from now. In his classes, a person could fantasize about being homeless,
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What Happens to Violence Once a Hierarchy Locks in?
David Geary says the formation of a hierarchy suppresses in-group violence once control is locked in.
Early polities follow a pattern, from states through larger empires. A lot of conflict comes at the beginning, when a hierarchy is established. A group of males, their kin, and their supporters take control of society and organize it. They develop systems for suppressing in-group competition and for suppressing people who want to displace them. There is a lot of violence at first, and then suppression of violence once the hierarchy is established. Eventually people get tired, revolts follow, or the rulers are displaced from outside.
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How Does Female Competition Differ From Male Competition?
David Geary says female competition runs through social networks inside the institutions men build, while male competition builds the coalitions, the technology, and the institutions.
Men start with kin-based coalitions, then pull in everyone who shares a language when stress rises, and later use religion or another ideology to make the groups larger. Conflict drives the advances, including drone and robot use in the Ukrainian war, and it drives how societies organize. As societies expand, men sort into a political class, a military class, an ideological class, and an entrepreneurial class, each a niche for competition, and they build coalitions of men to run the institutions.
Women are em