Status Updates From Teisusis protas: Kodėl geru...

seem to only be able to read 16 pages a day at the moment so we could be here a while. i do think this is going to be one of those books that i dip in and out of, and read something easier at the same time as it.

so interesting and successfully (slowly but surely) pulling me out of my reading slump

“In such proto-tribal societies, individuals who found it harder to play along, to restrain their antisocial impulses, and to conform to the most important collective norms would not have been anyone's top choice when it came time to choose partners for hunting, foraging, or mating. In particular, people who were violent would have been shunned, punished, or in extreme cases killed.”

“gene-culture coevolution…the ability to digest lactose is lost during childhood. The gene that makes lactase (the enzyme that breaks down lactose) shuts off after a few years of service, because mammals don't drink milk after they are weaned. But those first cattle keepers…had a vast new supply of fresh milk… Any individual whose mutated genes delayed the shutdown of lactase production had advantage.”

“Homo heidelbergensis is…our best candidate for Rubicon crosser. These people had cumulative culture, teamwork, and a division of labor, … shared intentionality, including at least some rudimentary moral matrix that helped them work together and then share the fruits of their labor. By crossing over, they transformed not just the course of human evolution but the very nature of the evolutionary process.”

“Many people assume that language was our Rubicon, but language became possible only after our ancestors got shared intentionality. Tomasello notes that a word is not a relationship between a sound and an object. It is an agreement among people who share a joint representation of the things in their world, and who share a set of conventions for communicating with each other about those things.”

“In contrast, when early humans began to share intentions, their ability to hunt, gather, raise children, and raid their neighbors increased exponentially. Everyone on the team now had a mental representation of the task, knew that his or her partners shared the same representation, knew when a partner had acted in a way that impeded success or that hogged the spoils, and reacted negatively to such violations.”

“According to Tomasello, human cognition veered away from that of other primates when our ancestors developed shared intentionality. At some point in the last million years, a small group of our ancestors developed the ability to share mental representations of tasks that two or more of them were pursuing together. ”

i did actually read some pages tonight but they were the introduction pages so this doesn’t count them 😒😒