TheSymposionNights
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2015–2024
9:02 · 323K views · Oct 28, 2012
A short clip of Robert Sapolsky on how social hierarchy generates chronic stress, drawing on baboon research. It links rank-related stress to heart health and life expectancy.
HN shares it as a compact explanation of how hierarchy and stress affect health, pointing to the longer full lecture.
3 comments from Hacker News
The full length video of his is definitely worth a watch, but if anyone's short on time, there's quite a good much shorter version focussing more on the hierarchy/alpha male side of it - this video
That is so true. Primates, not just apes. Here's Sapolsky explaining how stress in an hierarchical social arrangement impacts heart health and life expectancy. this video
> Read Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" I have, I don't fully agree with Dawkins. I'm not a biologist, merely a dilettante, but I can point to source [1] for some counter-arguments. First, there's a difference between the biological and the common use of the term 'altruism': > This biological notion of altruism is not identical to the everyday concept. In everyday parlance, an action would only be called ‘altruistic’ if it was done with the conscious intention of helping another. But in the biological sense there is no such requirement. Indeed, some of the most interesting examples of biological altruism are found among creatures that are (presumably) not capable of conscious thought at all, e.g. insects. For the biologist, it is the consequences of an action for reproductive fitness that determine whether the action counts as altruistic, not the intentions, if any, with which the action is performed. When I used the term I used it in the common sense, not in the biological one. Then there's the concept of kin selection: > The basic idea of kin selection is simple. Imagine a gene which causes its bearer to behave altruistically towards other organisms, e.g. by sharing food with them. Organisms without the gene are selfish—they keep all their food for themselves, and sometimes get handouts from the altruists. Clearly the altruists will be at a fitness disadvantage, so we should expect the altruistic gene to be eliminated from the population. However, suppose that altruists