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“But because humans are intensely social animals, they also faced a recurring set of crucial social evolutionary challenges. These evolutionary challenges include (1) evading physical harm, (2) avoiding disease, (3) making friends, (4) gaining status, (5) attracting a mate, (6) keeping that mate, and (7) caring for family.”
― The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think
― The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think
“Indeed, there is an emerging body of evidence to suggest that we are all modern cavemen, approaching the problems of our complex contemporary world using brains that evolved to confront ancestral problems.”
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“The 2011 US budget included $60 billion for “protection” and another $964 billion for “defense.” With a population of 311 million people, that averages out to $3,294.60 spent by every man, woman, and child for government protection. That does not include the additional taxes you pay to support your local police, incidentally.”
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“Just as it is too simple to say that people seek utility, it is too simple to say that people seek fitness. Instead, as we discuss next, human decision making is designed to achieve a set of very different evolutionary goals. In investigating how people meet these evolutionary goals, scientists have discovered something important: solutions to these different problems often require us to make decisions in different—and sometimes completely incompatible—ways. We are, in fact, inconsistent by design.”
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“Natural selection is a pretty efficient process, so if a behavior is found widely in humans and other species, it’s a better starting guess to presume it is adaptive rather than to assume it’s merely dumb.”
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Economics
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