The Moral Animal

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1. corethreeSep 2023
   >Your comments reek of pseudosciency pop evolutionary biology bullshit. Human behavior is way more complicated than you would hope.

   It's not "pop" shit. It's from a field called evolutionary psychology. A very real field in academia.

   By the nature of what's being studied evolutionary psychology is harder to statistically quantify things as they do in the hard science like physics and chemistry. What they do is they study commonalities between multiple cultures and come up with qualitative conclusions based off of the most likely inductive and logical explanation for those observed commonalities. This is quite common in the soft social sciences.

   Tribute to women and other mating displays from males... aka "romance" is across the board found in many divergent cultures. It is even found in animals.

   In animals generally the female species is the one being courted or romanced. This occurs because the female is the one that carries the child so she is the "gatekeeper".

   It is real and there are authoritative sources that illustrate what I say. There are many sources where you can read about this stuff.

   Here's one: The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology https://a.co/d/01Caa1v

   >Also diamonds are not rare.

   Rare enough such that diamonds can fill the role of a tribute object. Yes advertising does play a part but if diamonds were so abundant that they're only 10 bucks a pop women wouldn't care for one at all. Of course with the advent of synthetic diamonds the market value of diamonds is now largely artificial.

   All of this, however, does not detract from my point. If it's.not diamonds, it'd be something else.

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2. abbadaddaDec 2022
   You seem to be in denial that this phenomenon exists. I’d suggest reading _The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are._ Quite insightful. Status matters more than you’re letting on, and the perception of it is subconscious. No one (hopefully) is actively making an effort to look down on someone for riding their bike to their job at Pizza Hut - but many subtle things get registered by humans around us every day whether you or they are aware of it.
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3. abbadaddaJul 2022
   _The Splendid and The Vile._ My sister recommended it, and it was great on audiobook. I found the stories about Beaverbrook especially interesting. I found the insight fascinating into what Churchill was thinking during the war, how much he leaned on his closest advisors, and how badly some of Hitler's advisors fucked up. I wound up reading (or listening) to it through the lens of how important relationships are in whatever kind of work that we do. Also, in 2021 I read _The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are_ and it was the best book I've read in years.
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4. staticman2Mar 2021
   You have some odd ideas there.

   You might want to read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright for a more nuanced view of human nature by an evolutionary psychologist. (A field which is controversial at the best of times- but if you're going to believe something controversial but possibly true you can do a lot better than what you posted here)

   If I wasn't on my phone i'd type more, but in brief you have a weird idea of what fitness means for a woman looking for a mate. It doesn't necessarily mean "big muscles" but could mean something like a guy who loves her and will raise the kids with her. Because that's optimal for passing on genes.

   Furthermore fitness for a male in search of a woman might mean a guy who is monogomous and caring (because faking those traits to manipulate a woman might be too difficult) because he can convince a woman to mate with him because he will help her with the kids.

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5. tim333Mar 2021
   There was an interesting book on the theme that we've evolved to deceive ourselves especially on moral stuff like my side is good, the others are the bad guys https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psy...
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6. specialistJan 2021
   Thank you!

   I've been wondering how to continue learning about the ideas Graeber's writings introduced to me.

   Graeber's work puts me in the same frame of mind as Robert Wright (Nonzero, Moral Animal) did. Very optimistic.

   Hudson's anecdote about Deaton refusing to appear on stage with them is hysterical.

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