Reddit mentions: The best books about evolutionary psychology

We found 121 Reddit comments discussing the best books about evolutionary psychology. We ran sentiment analysis on each of these comments to determine how redditors feel about different products. We found 35 products and ranked them based on the amount of positive reactions they received. Here are the top 20.

1. The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

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The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
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Release dateDecember 1986
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2. Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are

Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are
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Release dateAugust 2006
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3. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

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Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
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4. The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Classic Study of the Urban Animal (Kodansha Globe)

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The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Classic Study of the Urban Animal (Kodansha Globe)
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Release dateMarch 1996
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5. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

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Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
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Release dateDecember 2016
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6. Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (A Harvest Book)

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Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (A Harvest Book)
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7. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
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8. A Natural History of Human Morality

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A Natural History of Human Morality
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9. The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
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10. Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (4th Edition)

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Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (4th Edition)
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11. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
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Release dateOctober 2017
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13. The Phenomenon of Man (Harper Perennial Modern Thought)

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The Phenomenon of Man (Harper Perennial Modern Thought)
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Release dateNovember 2008
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14. The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time

The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time
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15. The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization

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16. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
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17. Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe

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Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe
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Release dateAugust 2014
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18. Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World

Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World
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Release dateJune 2009
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19. A Natural History of Human Morality

A Natural History of Human Morality
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20. Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning

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🎓 Reddit experts on books about evolutionary psychology

The comments and opinions expressed on this page are written exclusively by redditors. To provide you with the most relevant data, we sourced opinions from the most knowledgeable Reddit users based the total number of upvotes and downvotes received across comments on subreddits where books about evolutionary psychology are discussed. For your reference and for the sake of transparency, here are the specialists whose opinions mattered the most in our ranking.
Total score: 17
Number of comments: 6
Relevant subreddits: 5
Total score: 16
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Total score: 11
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Number of comments: 4
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Number of comments: 2
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Total score: 1
Number of comments: 1
Relevant subreddits: 1

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Top Reddit comments about Evolutionary Psychology:

u/NapAfternoon · 12 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

We have a very good understanding of their intelligence. They are probably some of the most well studied species in terms of behaviour and cognitive abilities on this planet. In ELI5/TLDR* most researchers would characterize their intelligence of being equivalent to a 2-3 year old human child. Just a short list of things that characterize these species:

  • They form long-term social bonds and remember individuals

  • They are able to recognize self from other

  • They are able to lie

  • They are able to understand fairness

  • They are able to make, modify and use tools

  • They have culture and tradition

  • They are able to demonstrate empathy

  • They feel the same or similar emotions to humans

  • They have morals

  • They mourn the dead

  • They are able to solve multi-step problems

    ...

    I suppose another way of looking at this is what do we have that they lack. What makes humans unique?

    We know of some factors that contributed to our awareness and unique intelligence as compared to other living species. It is important to know that this is a very active area of study in many different disciplines (psychology, biology, animal behaviour, psychiatry, physiology, anthropology, neurology, linguistics, genetics, archeology...).

  • Traits we inherited from our distant ancestors. Obviously all species are a cumulation of inherited traits. Who we are today is largely due to who "we" were in the distant past. We inherited a strong tendency to be a very social species from our mammalian ancestry. Mammals are social beings, humans included. We inherited opposable thumbs from our early primate ancestors. Humans are not the only species with opposable thumbs so it is not a trait that is unique to our species. However, the inheritance of thumbs enabled us and the other primates to develop fine motor skills like precision grip. This enables us to manipulate objects, and make/modify tools. Humans also inherited an upright bipedal posture from our early ancestors. Humans are not the only bipedal species (after all, all birds are bipedal!) but our upright posture has given us many advantages, namely that it frees our hands to do other tasks.

  • Brain/body size ratio & exceptional brain gyrification is a somewhat useful indicator of how intelligence a species is. The correlation is decent among related mammal species, but it breaks down when applied to distantly related animals. It underestimates intelligence in heavy animals like horses and overestimates small animals like mice and birds. You also have to consider what the animal's brain has evolved for. Bird's typically have very large brains for their body but may not be exceptionally smart. A lot of that large bird brain is used for flight calculations and isn't available for higher level processing. Fruit flies have enormous brains compared to their mass, but that brain is simply too small to have any real thought processes. Humans are highly intelligent because they have an extremely large brain for their normal body mass and that brain has evolved specifically to perform complex thought. Size isn't the only factor, scientists also consider the degree of specialization, complexity of neural connections, and degree of brain gyrification. Humans score high on all these physical qualifiers associated with increased intelligence.

  • Two cognitive traits thought to be unique to humans - shared intentionality and cumulative culture. Shared intentionality goes one step further than being able to solve problems as a group, it involves anticipating the needs of others and the situation in order to solve a common goal. This requires incredible foresight, flexibility, and problem solving skills. It requires an almost hyper-sociality group structure. We couldn't stick 100 chimpanzees on a plane and expect it to land in one piece...but you can stick 100 human strangers and all, for the most part, get along just fine. This level of cooperation is rarely seen among other animals (save for the Eusocial insects, naked mole rats, and perhaps Callitrichid monkeys)...my point is we have a shared intentionality that allows us to be hyper-social and cooperative. Cumulative culture goes beyond the cultures exhibited by other animals. Other animals have culture where [non-essential] traditions are passed on from one generation to the next and can be modified slowly over many generations. Humans also have traditions, but these are past on much more easily between individuals. Moreover, these traditions are quickly modified, almost unlimited times within a generation. We are able to rapidly build upon the ideas of others and modify these ideas to suit new problems. Moreover, our adults, as compared to the adults of other species, are much better at learning and retaining new skills or traditions. Generally speaking, the age old adage "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" applies well to the non-human animal kingdom.

    These two traits, shared intentionality and cumulative culture, led to the development of other aspects of our being which are unique (e.g language). Everything else that we can do is just a happy by-product of these two traits: being able to go to the moon, or build a super dam, or create art, or think in the abstract, maths, industrial agriculture...Those things are by-products of our level of cognition. Our uniqueness is derived from shared intentionality and cumulative culture plus a couple of random physical traits that we were lucky enough to inherit from our distant ancestors - a big brain, bipedalism, and opposable thumbs. We are not the only species with a large brain-to-body ratio, we are not the only bipedal species, and we are certainly not the only species with opposable thumbs - these are physical characteristics that we inherited from our distant primate ancestors. These traits built the foundation for what was to come.

    Whatever the pressure around 40,000-50,000 years ago we notice a significant shift in the archeological record. All of a sudden humans are making cave art, our hunting tools are changing rapidly, we began to engage in long distant trade, we made jewellery and we even had symbolic figures - perhaps the seeds of language. This is known as the period of behavioural modernity. Not only did these humans look like us, they acted like us too. Its hypothesized that an infant from this time could be raised in a modern context with little to no intellectual deficit...we wouldn't be able to pick them out of a crowd. Humans haven't gotten more intelligent over time. It is hypothesized that a human from 50,000 years ago is anatomically and behaviourally modern.

    So, if we aren't any smarter - why do we have cell phones and galaxy print jeggings and people didn't way back then? Increasing complexity - we know more than people in the past because we've built upon what they've learned. Humans have always been smart, and our great benefit is that we build on other people's discoveries. Someone figured out how to domesticate plants, someone figured out how to sew cloth, someone figured out how to weave materials, someone figured out synthetic materials and dyes, someone put it all together in those jeggings. We just build on what other people have found out. This is cumulative culture in action. Humans today are not more intelligent than humans living 50,000 years ago - we both have the same potential. The difference between us and them is we have a wealth of shared knowledge to draw upon, and they did not. Humans 5000 years from now could be asking the very same question..."Why didn't they invent warp travel, its so easy!"...well we don't have the wealth of another 5000 years of experience and scientific study to draw upon. We only have what our ancestors gave us. As more and more knowledge is accumulated we should in theory progress faster and faster.

    Some interesting books on the subject:

    Age of Empathy

    Our inner ape

    Moral lives of animals

    Affective neuroscience

    Mothers and others

u/giveitawaynow · 1 pointr/socialism

It looks like you have quite a bit of reading to do:

> You mean like free-market capitalism that could work if only there were less regulation? And when that regulation is reduced then the problem shifts to some form of market-intervention elsewhere?

There's a HUGE difference between letting people decide how to regulate their lives, and enforcing strict laws at gun point. Free market doesn't only work, or not, with regulations, free market w/ regulations != free market. That's like me saying, Socialism could work, but only when there are private goods (lawls).

> Is that why it has to be called in every few decades to save Capitalism from the near-constant crises that result from its inherent and unavoidable contradictions? I wouldn't call those "solutions".

Not sure which crises you're referring to, if you're referring to the financial crisis..you mean the planned economy? Save it, the only reason why US isn't listed on there is because technically the Fed is a private company, but let's be honest here... it's pretty much the government's (or shall we say, the gov't is the Fed's? heh). A centralized planned economy is a Socialist concept, granted Marx also did say he favored decentralized, but that's cheating. He might as well said, "Oh yeah, something along the lines of Socialism and Capitalism will work." (Pick a # 1 - 10, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 did I get it?!)

> I agree — Capitalism is quite unnatural.

To an extent, I actually agree with you Socialists in terms of going back to our tribal days without computers and whatnot. Civilization is a dirty concept created by us humans. Personally I'd prefer to go bare in the jungle too, but not everyone will be on board like you and me.
The Human Zoo is an excellent book. Socialism = good if you like swinging on trees, Capitalism = good if you like internet. It all depends on what you want really :)

> Sorry, guess again. And in any case, attacking arbitrary groups of people rather than the argument itself simply does not help you.

Sure, I included arbitrary groups AFTER I attacked the main point, think of it like a "Director's Cut." And for fun, I'll take a guess at what type of person you are.. early 20s, in college, never seen a tax form in their life (besides may be a w-2 in which case even my dog has one of those.. I'd be mildly impressed if you've even seen a 1040 or a w-4).

So not really a strawman, nice try though :)

u/pretzelzetzel · 2 pointsr/atheism

Don't trust everything you read online, either. Books are still generally your best bet, because people who might not know what they're talking about can't edit them while you're reading them.

Obviously I'm not saying all books are better than all internets, but find some credible ones and you're much better off.

I'm not a scientist by training, but I can suggest a few books that will provide a pretty good counterbalance to what your mom will be teaching you. (A few of them have quasi-religious-sounding titles, too, so if she happened to find them lying around she might not get too angry.)

The Chosen Species: The Long March of Human Evolution

The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

A Brief History of Time

I can recommend more if you'd like. These ones are pretty broad surveys of the topics of (in order) evolution, more evolution, the role of science in society, and the physical nature of the universe. If you're homeschooled, I'm assuming high school-level? None of these books is technical - they're all 'popular science', intended to explain broad concepts to non-scientists. They're very, highly interesting, though, and it's easy to find recommended reading lists once you discover some specific topics that interest you. The Chosen Species itself has a lengthy and detailed bibliography and recommended reading section at the end.

I hope I've been able to help! Good luck!

u/reccedog · 3 pointsr/Ayahuasca

Your are very welcome. I am quite sure my Being here to give you this Gnosis is purposeful and synchronistic because your inner and outer worlds are aligning. It is a Joy to Be the Messenger.

There is a lot of symbolism in the image you posted that reminds me of a Vision that I had.

I came to find out it is a common Vision spoken of across many Ancient Traditions and modern times. It is the vision that Jacob had before he wrestled with an Angel to become Israel. It is the vision that Enoch had when he went to Heaven. There was a French Catholic Priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who also had the same vision. Interestingly, Salvador Dali, also had this vision and painted it. I see many symbolic similarities in Dali's painting and the image you posted.

In my vision I was told that the implement that Thoth wears on his head to balance the Universe through the Law of Karma is called the Omega Point. Pierre de Chardin was also told in his vision about the Omega Point and wrote about it in his book 'Phenomenon of Man'.

Akehnaten, who was a Pharoah in Egypt, is frequently depicted in scenes that seem related to the vision. You can see the similarity in this relief to the Angels in your image (on the upper left side) receiving Life (the Ankh) from above. It is not well known, but Akehnaten was Moses. The child that was put in a basket and floated down the Nile who was adopted by the Pharoah's daughter. He grew up and became Pharoah. He tried to unify all of the Egyptian Pantheon into the One God, who is the Creator God. He was run out of Egypt for this which is the Old Testament Exodus story.

I hope this Gnosis unlocks doors for you on the Spiritual and Healing path

All Love

🙏💜🙏

Edit: Also Frank Tipler who is a Physicist, writes and speaks from a perspective that makes me think he had the Vision. He also speaks of the French Priest Pierre de Chardin so it seems likely this is the case. His views are really interesting as they relate to Physics and the Nature of Creation.

u/[deleted] · 1 pointr/TheBluePill

Np, also I had a bit of a typo in my comment, my pet theory was actually that our higher cognitive function allows us to deviate from primal instinct to some extent but ultimately not enough to where we are perfectly moral, non-animalistic creatures-- we are very much driven by basic need, since that helps us survive and gets propagated throughout generations, the other things our intellect affords us such as awareness of our insignificance in the grand scheme of things or philosophy, art, etc. are just fortunate by-products of our abstraction ability, which was selected due to it's ability to aid us in survival and reproduction, consequently it is subservient to those basic drives.

Some other books I haven't even touched yet (but plan to) but which also have a good reputation:

https://www.amazon.com/Our-Inner-Ape-Primatologist-Explains/dp/1594481962

https://www.amazon.com/Chimpanzee-Politics-Power-among-Apes/dp/0801886562/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=6KQC849RMQDHAHCNND0J

https://www.amazon.com/SEX-AT-DAWN-STRAY-MEANS/dp/B00KEVTNSK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1498547954&sr=1-1&keywords=sex+at+dawn

https://www.amazon.com/What-Do-Women-Want-Adventures/dp/0061906093/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0061906093&pd_rd_r=2RBWQA67MBBA734QWF20&pd_rd_w=B1B9p&pd_rd_wg=HueSP&psc=1&refRID=2RBWQA67MBBA734QWF20

https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0679763996/ref=pd_sim_14_89?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0679763996&pd_rd_r=Q4WSH2CZDEQX8RASGQ0T&pd_rd_w=oCsRh&pd_rd_wg=mKnBF&psc=1&refRID=Q4WSH2CZDEQX8RASGQ0T

u/Johnzsmith · 1 pointr/books

No particular order:

Blind Descent by James M. Tabor. It is a great book about cave exploration and the race to discover the worlds deepest supercave.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Are you interested in the universe and how it all happened? This gives some pretty insightful answers.

From Eternity To Here by Sean Carrol. A really interesting view on the nature and concept of time and how it relates to the us and the universe. It can get a bit deep from time to time, but I found it fascinating.

Adventures Among Ants by Mark W. Moffet. It's about ants. Seriously. Ants.

The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. A first hand account of the ill-fated Scott expedition to the south pole in 1911-1912. Even after reading the book I cannot imagine what those men went through.

Bonus book: The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan. Human intelligence and how it evolved. Some really interesting stuff about the brain and how it works. A very enjoyable read.

u/get0ffmylawn · 1 pointr/philosophy

Beautiful.

If you don't understand this...

> ...cognitively a prefrontal human brain growing over the mammal brain, over the lizard brain, over the autonomous functions.

...then I highly recommend reading Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden. Sagan discusses the anatomy and evolution of the human brain in some detail, and it's a very, very accessible book for anyone interested in the physical sciences.

If you don't understand this...

> ...physiologically more bacteria than human...

...I'm afraid I don't have a book recommendation right now, but I highly recommend this podcast: Astronomy 141: Life in the Universe. Specifically, unit 3 (Life on Earth) contains a great distillation of what we know about the origins of life on earth and our own relation to bacteria, the most successful form of life on earth. If you don't want to listen to the whole unit (or the whole series), lectures 18, 19, and 20 are the most relevant (if I'm recalling their content correctly).

Anybody else wanna chime in with recommended videos, reading, etc.?

u/fduniho · 4 pointsr/askphilosophy

It seems likely that it would. I think so for a few reasons, which I will discuss in greater detail below.

  1. Animals appear to have consciousness.
  2. Human beings were around before human languages evolved.
  3. Human beings can do things that rely on consciousness without making use of language.

    Consider a squirrel. It makes some weird noises but doesn't have a language on par with anything like human language. When I put out a bird feeder with bird seed, some squirrel eventually figures out how to get the bird seed from the feeder. This requires the squirrel to have an understanding of its goal and the ability to come up with a plan for reaching its goal. I've recently read a book called Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal. In this book, he goes over the results of various experiments into animal intelligence. One of these experiments involves placing a piece of food into a suspended tube that has a trap in it. A chimpanzee can look at this tube and immediately figure out which end to put a stick in to get the food out without it falling into the trap. But when this experiment was tried with some species of monkey, the monkeys would have to experiment until they got it right. This showed that the chimpanzee had a greater ability to work things out in its mind. Another experiment with chimpanzees involved hiding pieces of food with only one chimpanzee as a witness to where the food was hidden. Instead of going straight to the hidden food, which would alert other chimpanzees as to where it was, the chimpanzee would wait until it could uncover the food in secret. Notably, this same experiment was done with two different chimpanzees in the same compound years apart. It was first done with a male chimpanzee, and he was still around when it was done years later with a female chimpanzee. The male chimpanzee noticed the behavior of the female chimpanzee, and he realized that she was acting the same way he had acted when he was the only one who knew where an apple had been hidden. So, he kept an eye on her, and when she uncovered the apple she had seen hidden, he came and took it from her.

    I am now reading Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought Our World to the Brink by Richard Currier. He covers these technologies in chronological order, and he gets to language in the 5th chapter, "The Technology of Symbolic Communication." The first four chapters are:

  4. The Primal Baseline: Tools, Traditions, Motherhood, Warfare, and the Homeland
  5. The Technology of Spears and Digging Sticks: Upright Posture and Bipedal Locomotion
  6. The Technology of Fire: Cooking, Nakedness, and Staying Up Late
  7. The Technologies of Clothing and Shelter: Hats, Huts, Togas, and Tents

    I would argue that all of these require some degree of consciousness. To make tools, weapons, clothing or shelter before using them requires some idea of what they are to be used for and how to make them. Following a tradition requires some consciousness that others are doing the same thing. Controlling fire without consciousness would be a very risky business. Fire can easily get out of control if someone isn't keeping a conscious watch over it.

    Once human beings evolved symbolic communication, they started forming larger groups, they started having tribal identities, and they started spreading around the world more rapidly. Currier maintains that it was symbolic communication that gave homo sapiens sapiens the edge over homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Since the use of language allowed homo sapiens sapiens to form large armies, they began to wipe out other human species and take over the world. Given what the use of language allowed modern humans to do, it looks like this wasn't around for a long period of earlier human evolution. Yet the human technologies that predate symbolic communication provide good evidence that humans already possessed consciousness.

    Let's now turn to some things that contemporary human beings do. They play sports, ride bikes, dance to music, and play video games. It is possible for people to engage in these activities without verbalizing what they are doing. In fact, continually verbalizing what we do is sometimes a way of slowing it down or making it more difficult. For example, when I'm keeping my balance while riding a bike, I have to be conscious of my body's position. But I'm not thinking about it verbally. The main value of symbolic communication is that I can share ideas with other people much more easily than I could without it. It also allows me to think about ideas I might not think of otherwise, such as God or communism. So, I expect that consciousness came first, then the need to communicate with others led to the development of language. Language helped us refine our thinking, but it was not what was responsible for making thinking or consciousness possible.
u/cahamarca · 1 pointr/changemyview

> I believe people do act selflessly everyday but I don’t think I makes rational sense to live this way. Why would I ever serve anyone’s ends other than my own

To put it bluntly, this isn't what the word "rational" means. Rationality is about taking the optimal path to a specified goal. It doesn't say anything about what that goal is. And that goal is always subjective and arbitrary, regardless of whether you are rational about achieving it.

So, in economics, they often talk about the rational, profit-maximizing business strategy. But "rational" and "profit-maximizing" are totally different things - maximizing profit is a subjective goal, and there are less and more rational ways to achieve it. I could just as easily talk about the rational cost-minimizing business strategy, which is a different objective that recommends a different path. Or an irrational profit-maximizing strategy that is clearly inferior for that goal.

So I dismiss your implicit claim that you are being more "rational" than an altruist who gives away all his money to the poor, because that's conflating the objective idea of rational decision-making with a subjective goal.

As a result, there's not really much for us to argue about, because it's not clear exactly how you've gotten to your conclusion, besides a misunderstanding of the word rational.

If you want to get into an empirical argument about humans, I think there's plenty of evidence that can change your view.

  • Humans are exceptionally cooperative and selfless among all life on earth. Very few organisms are as gregarious as humans or live in societies as large, and those that do are similarly oriented around "selfless" behaviors like participating in warfare.
  • humans are exceptionally selfless compared to other primates. Chimpanzees and bonobos live in dominance hierarchies in which the strong regularly appropriate the resources of the weak. As much as you can condemn human parallels like piracy and slavery, our species norm seems to be egalitarian forager groups that look nothing like chimp troops.
  • in social experiments, humans regularly forgo benefits because they perceive them as "unfair" to someone else. This is true for humans across cultures and across environments, even when taking the pot is clearly the rational "selfish" strategy.
  • under the right circumstances, humans are reliably willing to sacrifice their lives for non-kin, or even for abstract entities like nations or religions. The last three US Medal of Honor recipients died by literally jumping on hand grenades to save the lives of their fellow soldiers.

    It's no good to say people who jump on hand grenades or donate blood are "really" selfish because it makes them feel better or something, because you've essentially defined "selfish" to be "anything people do". If you take a stricter, more commonplace definition of selfish like "consistently chooses one's own material benefits at the expense of others'", then no, humans are exceptionally non-selfish among organisms on our planet.
u/Fluffoide · 5 pointsr/YangForPresidentHQ

Hard to make that argument, both cows and humans are 100% sentient. You're looking for sapience, which is humanlike intelligence such as wisdom.

However, it's hard to even say definitively that cows are not sapient. There's so much evidence of animal intelligence on a sliding scale with humans at one end of the scale, and you're talking as if humans were somehow independent of the scale.
If you're interested in this topic, I highly recommend the book Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?
It's an incredibly deep investigation into the nature of animal intelligence and the controversy surrounding the science of it. It changed the way I see animals.

u/keenmedia · 2 pointsr/atheism

just curious: If you are a Christian who believes in evolution, that means that you believe evolution is the mechanism or means through which God reveals his creation, right? Can you believe that He intervenes in your life personally? or in historical events? Or controls the weather?
Let me ask you this: What does understanding evolution teach you about the Almighty and His plan for your life? Is he a loving, caring 'father' ? Or a cold, uncaring bitch? How could you watch an Attenborough BBC special without experiencing cognitive dissonance. Rape, infanticide, cannibalism - all these things are perfectly 'natural' and happen everyday as part of normal animal behaviors. Are we to believe all animals are under the power of 'sin' in a 'fallen' world controlled by Satan? In a 'perfect' world, would no whale be a killer? Would sharks eat seaweed instead of fish?

Where do we even get these ideas of right and wrong? I used to think that it was God who created this conscience within us. But now i think that these systems of thought, taught to us by our parents and teachers, which condition us to be appalled at such behaviors, evolved naturally long,long ago out of the desires of our ancestors to live peaceful lives.

Dawkins summed it up: we would never want to live in a society founded on 'Darwinian' principles. It would have no tolerance for any weakness; only the winners matter. Think Road Warrior here.

I think the whole of human progression has been a long escape from this harsh and uncaring 'dog eat dog' world where 'survival of the fittest' is the law of the jungle. Life in the trees was short and brutal. Banding together,for protection at first, we moved out onto the plains and have co-evolved for millions of years as social animals, living in communities where weaker members have been able to survive and even reproduce; where coalitions of the less powerful have usually been able to control the ambitions of the 'alpha' and keep the tribe peaceful. A peaceful environment with plenty of food leaves lots of free time for doing things like pondering the mysteries of existence and creating new pieces of culture

Fascinating book: Our Inner Ape

u/ADefiniteDescription · 2 pointsr/askphilosophy

As /u/HideousRabbit notes, maybe nothing.

What does happen is that people often put forth such positions and take them to be obvious and they're not only not obvious, but they're obviously bad.

Apart from those problems, the proposal you're giving needs to be fleshed out significantly. What do you mean by "just a human construct"? What tie is that supposed to have to evolutionary theory? There's many ways you can go here. Some people want to use this line of reasoning to deny that there truly is anything such as morality, and instead we just have these things we call moral systems around but they don't have any true force. I don't have a lot of sympathy for these positions personally.

If you're interested in the relation between morality and evolutionary theory the psychologist Michael Tomasello has a new book called A Natural History of Human Morality which gives an evolutionary history of morality. It shares a number of affinities with philosophical theories of morality, including of constructivists like Stephen Darwall, Christine Korsgaard and David Gauthier.

u/mischiffmaker · 10 pointsr/JusticeServed

Other mammals have been evolving for as long as we have, as has brain function. I'm reading a really interesting book on animal intelligence, by Franz DeWahl, "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are"

The answer seems to be, not until we gave up expecting to measure animal intelligence from a human POV, and instead started looking at the world from the given species' POV.

Turns out, animals are just as smart as we are when researchers stop expecting, for instance, chimpanzees to pass a facial recognition test--for human faces instead of chimpanzee faces.

The bias? Thinking that human faces are so "distinct from one another" so any other species should be able to recognize human individuals, right? Turns out, wrong!

Chimps recognize their own species' faces every bit as easily as we recognize other humans'.

And even then, think how often humans have tried to claim that "all Asians look alike" or "all Africans look alike" or "all Europeans look alike." No, they've just been "othered" the same way other species' individuals are "othered,"--other species "other" us, as well.

So, yes, it's obvious that adult animals that live around humans recognize when that human is a baby and act accordingly. After all, they've been raising their own young all those millions of years, too.

u/hedpane · 2 pointsr/science

Yep, I was definately reffering to the Formics.
And I agree that intelligence is a very complicated matter. A good book about the subject is The Neighborhood Project. It talks a lot about human culture and civilazation from an evolutionary perspective, as pretty much a seperate evolutionary process on its own. All of what you're talking about (AI, advances in science, etc) are just steps in the evolutionary process that is our culture. Just think about how much smarter we are since we have computers, cars, boats, cooking recipes. It's not genetic, but it definately makes us look more intelligent than chimps. anyways, I feel like I'm repeating myself at this point. Great book tho

u/ShiddyShiddyBangBang · 4 pointsr/Dogfree

The book was Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are by Frans de Waal

You shouldn’t think it from the title of the book, but it’s actually a pretty objective look at the way delusions/distortion in the human brain (mainly re: idea of human exceptionalism) interfere with the way people interpret animal behavior.

I felt like the book was an attempt to “right size” the distorted ways people view animals.

The reference to dogs/cats hijacking the neural pathway for parenting was a really small reference in the book so I don’t want to mislead but overall I really enjoyed this book and was going around saying “did you know...” for days lol.

u/DoctorDickie13 · 6 pointsr/NatureIsFuckingLit

Wow! Great info! I read this book called “Other Minds”
(https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Consciousness/dp/0374227764) and it suggested that octopuses and cuttlefish use their color as a form of expression, sort of like talking. But in a language specific to the individual. This was based on the non localization of the octopuses “brain” and the lack of continuity in their patterns. Aside from the more primitive communication. This is better described in the book, obviously. Just wanted to pitch in on some already fantastic information, and see if you have any more information to add.

u/rockytimber · 1 pointr/IAmA

So the primary clues and references are often more behavioral (clinical or historical) than cellular or genetic? Or the overlap or correlation of the two?

This book: http://www.amazon.com/Recursive-Mind-Origins-Language-Civilization/dp/0691145474/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381020234&sr=1-1&keywords=the+recursive+mind

got me thinking more and more about the facet of human culture having taken on a life of its own, an evolution of its own, for which the biology of the species seems just more of an underlying grid of infrastructure than deterministic of changes at the edge. Like a software that has found work arounds for any hardware limitations, even at the cost of efficiency. The book references basic associative capabilities growing into the capacity to name, conceptualize, generalize, and abstract, and then to perform layers of comparisons/computations on these building blocks.

It looks like your colleague Rich Keefe (Duke?) might get a lot of clues of function from examples of dysfunction. I was once married into a family with multiple examples of schizophrenia, and there is nothing like the pain of disability to sharpen one's appreciation for how the process ever works as well as it does.

u/Brynden_Rivers_Esq · 6 pointsr/likeus

I think we need to practice with octopuses. They're a totally alien intelligence, but ask researchers who work with them. They have complex relationships and personalities! They're crazy smart and good at solving puzzles. They're totally alien in that our common ancestor is more than twice as far back as the first dinosaurs! So we've got a handful of the same building blocks, but our minds developed totally independently. But we're both intelligent and sentient. I can't wait until one of them learns a form of language that we can understand (presumably with our help). Can you even imagine? I mean, they're so completely different from us in so many ways...but they still exhibit behaviors that suggest beliefs that are at least relatable to our own, even if they're not the exact same!

This book is next on my reading list I think: https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B01FQRPIIA/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

u/RadagastTheTurtle · 16 pointsr/Foodforthought

My partner wrote a very similar piece about how unscientifically most people (and many scientists) think about animal intelligence. I also recommend the book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? to anyone interested in this topic.

u/oldskater · 10 pointsr/NatureIsFuckingLit

If you're curious to find out why they live such short lifespans and learn more about their intelligence, I highly recommend "Other Minds" by Peter Godfrey-Smith: https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Consciousness/dp/0374227764 The subtitle is "The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness." Very readable and informative.

Octopus minds are basically as close as we'll get to encountering alien intelligence.

u/restricteddata · 1 pointr/todayilearned

According to Temple Grandin (in _Animals in Translation_), mice do the same thing. If you run mice through a maze all day, you can (through electrodes embedded in their brain or something), correlate various brain signals with where they were in the maze. Then, later, when they go to sleep, you can still look at the data coming from the brain signals, and you can tell that they are still running the maze in their dreams. Pretty crazy idea, pretty cool experiment.

(The book is very interesting, and chock full of strange animal facts. Check it out!)

u/humblenations · 1 pointr/edmproduction

I can also recommend this book about the way the brain works in terms of art and such. It's good reading for anyone creating art.
Finding that sweet spot between what's familiar and what's intriguing is what all artist should try and achieve. Reading this will make you understand that a lot more.

Riveted by Jim Davies

u/boborone · 1 pointr/changemyview

I'm not sure there is an "ethical" way to slaughter. Just more humane.

Temple Grandin made it her career rather than just advocating with words. She's is far from an SJW, just a person with autism who noticed she saw the world in a different view. A view that let her see things in a way that related to how animals see the world.

I read about half of this book she wrote. It explains how she got started and what she does. She's done a Ted Talk, written tons of articles on the treatment of animals and how it should be done, written books about animals and about autism, and works for the industry going around the country and transforming the way every step of an animal's life is handled. Yeah, there's bad places, but there are also lots of great places thanks to her work and what she has done.

Edit to add the [movie](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin_(film) about her.

And sorry if you're on desktop, some of the links are mobile. I'm on my phone.

u/busterfixxitt · 2 pointsr/atheism

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is a very readable and engaging book that covers what we know and more importantly HOW we know it. There's another version I believe called A Really Short History of Nearly Everything that appears to be a condensed version.

There are 3 audiobook versions, but the best one is narrated by William Roberts and is impossible to find online. I'm currently working on turning my mp3 version into a proper audiobook with chapters, etc. PM me and I'll send you the link when I upload it.

You may also be interested in Caveman Logic and the more dangerously titled The Bonobo and the Atheist

u/YoungModern · 2 pointsr/exmormon

I recommend:

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought by Pascal Boyer on the origins of superstitious and supernatural thinking

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In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion by Scott Atran on why the tendency towards religiosity was preserved for its social utility instead of being eliminated.

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More than Nature Needs: Language, Mind, and Evolution by Derek Bickerton on the origins of language.

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A Natural History of Human Morality by Michael Tomasello on the origins of morals.

u/emr1028 · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

I will never give up an opportunity to pitch The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan. If you want insight into why you think the way you do, this is one of the best places to get it.

u/DarthRainbows · 2 pointsr/psychology

I'm not super wide-read on the subject or anything. There do seem to be more books on this subject coming out though. E.g. Here is an interview with the author of another one:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/01/joshua_greene_o.html

Maybe that will be of some interest. Another recent book (which I read, unlike Greene's) is Michael Tomasello's Natural History of Human Morality which is about the evolution of morality (I think this is probably a key component of understanding morality). It was pretty good, although very expensive for some reason (like £25 in the UK).

Personally though I don't think anyone has cracked this nut yet.

u/poliphilo · 4 pointsr/askphilosophy

If you're interested in Harris's take on it in particular, I suggest looking at this blog post, and also follow the links to some philosophers' reviews of his book, The Moral Landscape. I'm glad Harris responded to his critics, though I don't think he rebutted the most important criticisms.

If you're interested in the underlying question about how ethics might be rationally derived, you could work your way through the SEP page on Kant's Moral Philosophy and investigate others from there. It's pretty dense though! Sidgwick's book that I mentioned above is good and very relevant if you want to trace through the history of these ideas.

If you want to skip to more recent discussion, Simon Blackburn has two books on the topic: Being Good is very accessible and meant to introduce the topics to non-philosophers; Ruling Passions is more technical but IIRC, Chapters 5 and 6 are very relevant to this exact debate and reasonably approachable.

u/VoodooIdol · 1 pointr/Equality

You should read this book. It talks a lot about the evolutionary reasons that such things developed in humans, and is really incredibly interesting. I think you would enjoy it.

u/T_H_E_Y · 1 pointr/atheism

My 2nd favotite book next to God Delusion: (http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072) It explains organically why we are cursed with a cocept of god in the first place. Dawkins makes mention of Jaynes' theory, and gives a nod to my other 2nd favorite related book by Carl Sagan (http://www.amazon.com/The-Dragons-Eden-Speculations-Intelligence/dp/0345346297)

u/RandyMFromSP · 1 pointr/books

The Robot's Rebellion by Keith Stanovich is a good follow-up to The Selfish Gene. Kind of builds on Dawkin's ideas and is a very interesting read.

u/peter-salazar · 3 pointsr/evopsych
  1. Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite, Kurzban
  2. How the Mind Works, Pinker
  3. Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (4th Edition) by David Buss http://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-Science-Mind-Edition/dp/020501562X
  4. Mating Intelligence Unleashed, Scott Barry Kaufman and Glenn Geher
  5. Spent, Miller
  6. The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature, Gad Saad

    If you're open to other theoretical approaches, Predictably Irrational and Thinking Fast and Slow will blow your mind
u/Beneficial2 · 1 pointr/JoeRogan

i recommend THIS book. Very interesting stuff about the reptile brain.

u/bucknuggets · 2 pointsr/atheism

The Moral Animal by Robert Write is a classic book that does a great job describing how many of our morals are built-in and were developed for evolutionary reasons.

u/dopeslope · 2 pointsr/atheism

Try The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan. It doesn't touch much on your specific question but it talks about how the mind works. I'm currently reading it and highly recommend it.

u/Capolan · 2 pointsr/todayilearned

It's hard. Food is a bonding experience for humans now. Desmond Morris talks about this quite a bit in The Human Zoo. We have strong rituals around our meal times.

u/SusheeMonster · 2 pointsr/NotHowGirlsWork

Nice. I wonder where I can find a pirated copy. I wanna see how deep this rabbit hole goes
https://www.amazon.com/dp/020501562X

u/Fuzzyphilosopher · 4 pointsr/news

It doesn't have to be raised this inhumanely though. Temple Grandin is an animal behavior specialist. She's single-handedly revolutionized the humane treatment of slaughter animals in the United States. Her book animals in translation has chapters on each of the industries she has worked with. YOU should check out the chapter on chickens. http://www.amazon.com/Animals-Translation-Mysteries-Behavior-Harvest/dp/0156031442

u/AdActa · 7 pointsr/Denmark

Det er et fascinerende eksempel!

Jeg er utrolig inspireret af den canadiske psykolog Keith Stanovich, som er en af de førende forskere inden for det specifikke felt i psykologien.

Den bedste og mest tilgængelig bog er "The Robots Rebellion" Som jeg ikke kan anbefale nok. Men, den handler om mange flere ting end bare rationalitet og intelligens.

Han har også skrevet "Rationality and the Reflective Mind" som specifikt handler om rationalitet og intelligens. Den er en lille smule fagtung, og det er svært for mig at vurdere, hvor svær den er for lægmand. Men du er meget velkommen til at skrive til mig og spørge om enkeltdele, hvis du giver dig i kast med den,

Endelig har Stanovich, sammen med en række kolleger, skrevet en bog om rationalitet som et målbart parameter, hvor de forsøger at opstille en gennemgående skala for rationalitet på linje med de klassiske IQ tests. "The rationality quotient" Jeg har ikke læst den, men den er allerøverst på min læseliste.

u/elcurrid · 2 pointsr/ActLikeYouBelong

Read Other Minds by Peter Godfrey for more cool cephalopod insight, so cool.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Consciousness/dp/0374227764

u/BroodingDecepticon · 129 pointsr/NatureIsFuckingLit

You would like the book Other Minds. It's about Cephalopod psychology and the beginning of the book depicts their evolution.

Edit: Link for the lazy

u/YThatsSalty · 1 pointr/AskReddit

Dragons of Eden by Sagan, as well

u/mavnorman · 3 pointsr/evolution

If you're okay with academic texts, the usual starting point is a textbook.

Buss' "Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind is in the 4th edition.

Workman and Reader's "Evolutionary Psychology. An Introduction." is in the 3rd edition.

u/Agreeable_Ocelot · 7 pointsr/stupidpol

The author is Temple Grandin - she has written a number of books circling the area of autism. I believe this is the one I am thinking of.

u/Five_Decades · 0 pointsr/PurplePillDebate

Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-New-Science-Mind/dp/020501562X

Chapters 4, 5 & 6.

u/pomod · 2 pointsr/gifs

You might dig this book - I read it this summer and found it enthralling.

u/Lar-Shemp · 3 pointsr/space

Dragons of Eden was a real eye opener for me.

u/tetttet · 1 pointr/AskReddit

It's from a textbook. The textbook was Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, by David M. Buss.

u/patsnsox · 1 pointr/explainlikeimfive

This is the theory about sleep anyway. Lots more science to be done. But this is what I have always heard, remember first reading about the questions of sleep and neural pathways in

http://www.amazon.com/The-Dragons-Eden-Speculations-Intelligence/dp/0345346297

u/new_grass · 6 pointsr/DebateAVegan

It depends on what you mean by 'sentient'.

Plants are capable of responding to their environment and to noxious stimuli. There is a sense in which they process information about their environment. But the same can be said of security cameras and thermometers. I don't think it is morally significant.

There is a another sense, which is having a conscious experience of one's environment. It's the difference between conscious and unconscious processing of one's environment, of there being something "it is like" to undergo an experience.

Because we cannot directly the experience the subjectivity of another being, we will never have incontrovertible proof that plants are not conscious in this sense. But we can reason indirectly about it, and make some informed guesses on the basis of observed plant behavior. We can take the experience of pain as an example, since it's the one that comes up most often in these discussions.

Pain has an adaptive function in animal organisms because animal organisms are capable of modulating complex behavior in response to it, and to prioritize the harmful stimuli over the many other kinds of stimuli their are receiving, often from many other sensory modalities.

Plants, by contrast, do not take in information from many different sensory modalities, and there is no evidence that they have a central way of integrating these various modalities into a single experience. There is no evidence they have anything like attention, which they can direct in different ways. They way in which they respond to threats from the environment is more akin to a mousetrap being set off; just as a mousetrap doesn't need to be conscious in order to function, I'd wager that a plant wouldn't really benefit from a conscious experience of pain, because there is no attention and decision-making (in a CNS, for example) that it might inform.

I'd recommend reading Other Minds for a nice account of the origins of consciousness. The author provides some compelling reasons for thinking that a nervous system is really central to its emergence.

u/jlbraun · 25 pointsr/science

Ms. Grandin actually lives down the road from me, very interesting lady. She has two good books out too:

http://www.amazon.com/Animals-Make-Us-Human-Creating/dp/0151014892/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251862720&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Animals-Translation-Mysteries-Autism-Behavior/dp/0156031442/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251862720&sr=8-5

She is one of the greatest animal advocates out there - her attitude is, "People eat meat. Can't be helped. If people are going to continue to eat meat, I should help those animals have a good life and die humanely. If I don't help them for whatever reason (If I thought that people should all be vegetarians, and animal slaughter should be outlawed a la PETA) then that's an unreasonable position and will never happen, and animals would still going to be getting raised and killed inhumanely. So, it sucks that animals have to die, but they wouldn't be alive in the first place if we weren't raising them to eat them - so let's do it right."

She also puts all or most of her humane slaughterhouse designs into the public domain so as many people can use them as possible.

u/Legal_Disclaimer · -2 pointsr/dayz

>'Characteristics of our evolutionary ability to survive are suppressed' - this sounds like you've read Nietzsche recently.

I find Nietzsche incredibly boring. Carl Sagan wrote a book describing what I said in the context of the evolution of the human brain.

The short version is the neo-cortex(the one biological difference between us and all other animals) evolved over a reptilian brain, which evolved over a fish brain. We have logic, but we have uncontrollable emotional impulses as well. We have a biological imperative which drives us to survive, and in spite of our "humanity," it is impossible to rid ourselves of this evolutionary trait.

>In fact - human cooperation and altruism are probably some of our traits that have let us survive to our time.

Nearly all animals cooperate on an immediately obvious scale. If you account for the food chain/cycle of life, then every single organism on the planet coorperates with every other organism. Cooperation is not at all unique to humans. In fact, it could be argued human cooperation is deeply flawed, seeing as how we are capable of duplicity and betrayal, whereas other animals on the planet do not express these traits and instead work in harmony.

The idea of altruism as a survival characteristic is absurd. Any species not acting selfishly will become extinct very quickly. The idea of altruism is itself a design of society. Look at any ethics debate on it and you'll find the end result is the question of whether true altruism even exists.

>I do believe that people would try to work together as much as possible for as long as possible.

I agree, but the scale you seem to imply is simply not sustainable without the current infrastructure, and our infrastructure would disappear within a few weeks. I believe society would disintegrate into family units which can support themselves through force and/or agriculture. Perhaps once they are well established in the new environment they will seek other survivors and begin to establish a new society within the changed environment.

>'Killing other people for your own sake becomes a necessary normality', well there's another strange assumption.

This is a perfectly rational assumption. I think this idea is brilliantly addressed in The Walking Dead graphic novels. You might kill to defend yourself. You might kill to reap someone else's home or supplies. You might be a sociopath. You might even send someone away at gunpoint, condemning them to an equal fate. You might kill someone to protect the secret of your location. Either they die, or you do, and unless you are insane or a samurai you will probably choose them.