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Episode 108: Punishing children, advice to psychology students, cynical from evo psych
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all right good evening everybody it's Nate G here along with dr. Doug Lyall dr. Lyle how you doing today good how are things they're doing pretty good it's getting a little bit warmer so that's always nice yeah suffering down there yeah all right all right well we've got some questions today and so did we're going to run through them alright dear dr. Lyle why do some children repeat actions several times despite being punished for it does punishment not work well first of all you you want to use this as an opportunity to back up and realize that all behavior is taking place under cost-benefit analysis so the child there's a reason why they were doing it in the first place and that's that there's some attractive reward for them to be doing whatever it is that they shouldn't be doing so the fact that we punish them we are attempting to alter the cost-benefit analysis but you might not alter it enough to to cause the behavior to change so there so this is also it's also true that if it's punished intermittently so you don't catch them every time so maybe you're catching them stealing cookies from the cookie jar every third time and whacking them bottom line is is that two out of three times they're getting away with it so this is what this is then being configured into the kids cost-benefit analytic machinery and the etc so that therefore just depends upon how good the reward is relative to how what the probability and intensity of the punishment is and kids running a calculus so punishment certainly does work in other words punishment alters the cost-benefit analysis for any living you know thing with a nervous system punishment will work but the question is how well it will work is simply a matter of what the entire cost-benefit analytic package is with respect to this behavior and it's in its consequences so that's the story on that ie hit him harder no I can't say that's not what I meant sort of flowed out of me no Chuck it's now it's also true that sometimes the increasing the severity of the punishment doesn't seem to work and that's because you sort of maxed it out in some ways in other words there's laws of diminishing returns on all kinds of things like I for example if someone were to pay you half a million dollars a year to do something some job that you like to do anyway it really wouldn't motivate you that much more to make it five hundred twenty-five thousand dollars a year in other words we're already hitting the high side the same thing is true with with punishment so there are diminishing returns on relatively extreme ends of any punishment or reward scale so the unit's are not even distributed throughout the range of punishment or reward so that's why sometimes it can look like something's not working because it turns out that there's the the behavior that the child is doing is rewarding and up to the child that you can't get the punishment high enough to completely obliterate the motivation for doing whatever it is so that's the that's the end of that mystery and so does the child's you know I mean obviously the child doesn't change their their motivational system meaning they might still be attractive that whatever that stimuli is and I just don't want to be hid and so when that when that threat is gone well they yeah still be nervous about it yeah in other words they're still going to any creature is going to make contingency analysis of action and result but this is where a lot of these interesting things start coming together like for example what how close is the is the contingency between when the person did the act and when it is that they got punished for it if you're going to quote get punished when your dad gets home and that's six hours from now then then it's like wow that's not a very tight contingency and the the creature doesn't learn that contingency that well it's you know pretty remote out there in the future so you're going to find that if they if the kit kid doesn't act and they are immediately and consistently punished for it and the punishment is sufficient enough the it's a problematic enough relative to the reward they'll learn just fine but as you start messing around with any of these parameters you are going to find that the contingency of punishment to altering behavior you know starts to be reduced that's just how that works obviously you if you made it if you breaking into a jewelry store with a baseball bat and grabbing half a million dollars with the jewelry got you one week in the county pen where they serve your really good food and just had a hard mattress everybody be doing it or all kinds of people would be doing it so obviously the risk reward ratios are always being run by all animals and Punishment is not in any way any kind of independent to entity out there it is simply part of a cost-benefit analysis that that every creature runs and so when parents are trying to punish their kids to quote teach them something that's been thinking how easy it is it is it actually influenced children a beautiful question made really good question yes the parents a lot of times have an agenda that they feel like they're going to help their child learn responsibility or learn to be you're more respectful or etc etc you're not going to teach anything of the kind those are personality characteristics and you are not going to alter their personality trajectories at all you might have a short term terrifying influence on getting them to you know stand up straight and you know recite the Lord's Prayer you know and with a certain tone inflection in order to not get to do not get punished in some way but you are in no way quote instilling values ie altering the person's personality and how they evaluate you know things in life so yes great question and yes so sometimes parental motives are quite naive in fact they usually are and that's that's probably the the most fundamentally naive thing that parents think and you know that you can't help them they're there essentially they're thinking this through as best they can and with the notion if they can get the kid to to see that this was a profitable way of doing things and this is a good way of doing things and that there's rewards for doing it this way and punishments for doing it that with and that will become essentially who the child is it will not but it may but it will be who the child is this week under those other conditions and when do you think that started was it more that there was more more resources available now parents are nervous up there their displays are going to be you know inconsistent with their own personality or I can't imagine our parents doing this in a stone 8 but you know I consider myself a layman here so right right yeah who knows over the centuries certainly people have not I think it's I think it's been a little difficult to tease apart and it is very difficult for people to tease apart the notion of the fact that you can influence behavior in the short run but you cannot influence it in the long run so I think that that's for one thing children are a lot more important today than they ever were in history children in history were like a vermin they're all over the place and you're having a whole bunch of them so it's not like you're having two kids and you're trying to get them to Harvard Medical School that isn't that isn't what children were children people are having 810 children for god sakes so they weren't they weren't sweating over the details of these child's personality development and their their trajectories out in the future they were much more much more interested in getting them to deal with and manage the conflicts of interest in the whole group as the discipling zor-el blowing each other the teeth over the last apricot so that that's how it really was so really most punishments were about behavioral control in the present not about shaping of personality into the future so you know certainly the 20th century's fascination with the standard social science model is the politically correct model that anybody can turn into anything we can we can take silly putty and turn it into Einstein you know that that notion that also you know it has its notion not only with respect to intelligence and achievement but with respect to character as well that follows along behind us the but in addition to to that that sort of influence coming out of of academia and leaking all over a a willing press corps the you also have the additional issue of the fact that children are rare and more valuable and so there's more investment and more anxiety and and effort being put into quote shaping the child's competitive future so I think that's that's where a lot of this comes from Wow that answers a couple of open loops okay good cue dr. Lyle any advising students currently studying psychology how can they avoid buying into theories that are of no use or substance what should they watch out for and how can they practice being up stems to people um let's see the the best advice that I can give to young students studying psychology would be to buy a textbook that you'll have to dig into your you know summer goof-off money and buy a textbook called evolutionary psychology the new science of the mind by David buss that is the antidote to you know essentially a lousy education that you very well might get at your university like for example I can speak from direct knowledge of a person that was recently studying at UC Berkeley the education the psychology department movies is a total fiasco so evolutionary psychology is essentially nowhere to be found and where it's where anything that even remotely looks like it such as behavior genetics starts to come up yeah we get we get stomped on by the standard social science model so that the truth is not leaking out very carefully you see because if it does your your term paper will instantly go from an a to a C so the so yeah my advice is buy and read david buses evolutionary psychology the new science of the mind it is a it is meant to be a psychology 101 textbook i first i read the first edition probably fifteen years ago when it came out and i can tell you i had a creepy feeling when i finished the book my creepy feeling was that the undergraduate that studied that book and had to take a test on it and got himself a be new vastly more about psychology than any other PhD in psychology that I had ever met okay so that that was the interesting thing about that and I have to say when I read the book for the first time I'd already you know this was fifteen years past my doctorate I had I had to take out a pad of paper and take notes chapter by chapter because I was I was learning so much even in the early going that I realized that I had better go back and take my psych 101 class from from the master and get it right so that that's what I would do and by the time you're done with that you'll really see you know just how extraordinary the foundation is now behind evolutionary psychology and you won't be swayed by anything else at least that's what I think all right and so this being assistant to practice being of assistance to people there isn't anything that we need to worry about you've got a you've got an innate ethical guidance system inside of you saving don't need to practice anything just be yourself Wow there we go doc yeah so as far as as far as you know if someone comes in and reads this textbook of evolutionary psychology by a doctor bus and they you know they get basically go down the rabbit hole of evolutionary psychology how do you suggest that they approach their professors because I mean one of my passions is nutrition and I remember taking classes on nutrition and I would I would take some some of these multiple choice tests and I would look at the choices and you know they're all wrong and I have to start there and think like okay what does the professor think that the answer is and it just was really frustrating doing that yeah yeah fortunately on the multiple choice quiz there won't be an answer that looks anything like a evolutionary psychology show you'll never get confused as you're as you're reading the thing the all the answers will be they'll be the obvious you know answer that you studied for and you just check that box and don't worry about what the truth is the yeah it isn't the professors are not being obstinate they are simply not not read in the field generally speaking and so they they've read what they've read and they know what they know very well and they will test you on it so don't worry about it if you're if you're interested in it's always fine to listen to you can sit there and listen to a professor that does not understand any of this and is not knowledgeable and you can sit them walk right through steak after mistake that doesn't stand up to evolutionary logic and is clearly you know falling apart right in front of you it's fine don't worry about it that's it it's good to get an education that yeah from the sort of the people in the conventional field because then you know that they don't know and that gives you confidence as you go forward that guess what you're on your own okay you're on your own this is you're going to have to use your brain and you're going to use the people that have come before you that have walked the same path you know we've got a bunch of giants stand on the shoulders of so you you get your Robert Wright book the moral animal you get David buss and you get to being cosmides and and Matt Ridley and you get your you become armed to the teeth with understanding how this all works and then you go and you use a good common sense and some things that you hear on that podcast and you'll do a great job fantastic and for any of our listeners who are looking for a reading list we've got a reading list up on the website be your genes org okay so next question dear doctor is the scientific truth always the best for our own mental health evolutionary psychology has made me rather cynical about the opposite sex now I tend to see the primitive patterns more in my day-to-day interactions I've now feel like I'm a very judgmental person how can I change that about myself whilst being aware of some bitter realities that's an interesting set of thoughts there let me see that's cynical about the opposite sex if this is a female asking this question that makes a lot of sense yeah you should be cynical about the opposite sex you should understand that they've got you know they could be intentionally deceiving you behind casual mating strategy and and therefore you know as you should be as one woman I met said so basically what you're telling me is don't eat treat them like prospects treat them like suspects which is like not a bad idea now the let's see you're a very judgmental person I'm not so sure I'm not quite sure what this person is sort of what's happening in there inference making machinery about evolutionary psychology I mean possibly you you you proper you potentially see through superficially altruistic act a little more clearly you may see through suit through more significantly looking ulcerous exacts and understand that even though they're altruistic and even though they are essentially they may be evidence of the person's character caring etc etc they still have within them deep evolutionary roots that are distal to the person's own awareness and so that in other words they aren't doing anything for nothing but that doesn't mean that they but they are being devious or Machiavellian so if that's what you're thinking yeah these is the person says how you you know how do you think about things when when you see these bitter realities you know I'm actually I'm not sure what video bitter realities they mean and so I would encourage them to to write to us again and sort of list what they're what this individual is feeling like they are bitter about or you know what they see is as problematic from this perspective this perspective does require an ability to sit back and grasp and and somehow make some peace with with what we call the tragic view of existence and I've said this many times before but just to reiterate this in the context of this question that that there are two different broad philosophical positions or there's there's a dimensionality to philosophy about human nature and its condition and one of them you will see a lot in a utopian thinking that you know everybody should be fed everybody should have a nice this everybody should have a nice made and everybody should be brilliant and everybody can turn in anything that they want and there shouldn't be any conflicts and if we all just talk gently to each other then we're not going to have a problem okay if we would all become nice friendly quiet careful's selection of language Buddhists then we wouldn't have any conflicts of interest that that's a lovely utopian fantasy but it doesn't remotely resemble the animal that we're looking at it the truth is is that nature itself has brutal realities that are much more bitter than the realities that human nature finds dealing with their own conflicts of interest all over the animal kingdom what you see is you see brutal life-and-death struggle between predators and prey and somebody has to die so the predator is is ineffective at what they do they and their children will die and if the prey is ineffective they and their children will die and there is no peace between predator pray they have the ultimate conflict of interest and this this is the the nature of the battle of genetics as jeans wove their way into all making alternative machines in order to reproduce themselves and those machines ultimately are conflicted within human nature and human human condition there are conflicts too one girl in a class the two boys really like only one of them gets to be with her gay two girls are sweet on one handsome guy only one of them gets to be with her or worse yet a whole bunch of guys are attracted somebody and none of them get to be with her because somebody else from out of town is going to be with her and so on and so forth okay and so in human positions in various and sort of dominance hierarchies you can't have a super bowl that means anything to anybody unless everybody else loses so you can have I don't know one winning team and 31 teams that didn't win and so this is not you know we call it the tragic view not because it's always this surly tragedy but it's a way of underscoring and understanding that there are conflicts and that's just the way it is that's not a bitter reality okay it it gives life an edge the very nature the fact that life is limited in its scope you know you're not a tree that's just going to sit here without any feelings and hope there's a rain that you know comes down on you and that there's no fire and you're going to live for 4,000 years that isn't how it's going to be the truth is is that you have to make choices within the limited context of your your lifespan and expected lifespan and you have to make choices and those choices require judgment and gambling and you have to guess guess on what's what you know what are the best place and best people to to mate with you know where are the best friends to make where you can invest your energy snorted trade and commerce where you going to live this life what are you going to eat where you're going to go on vacation and you know whether you're going to go over to your lousy in-laws for Christmas when you've had five bad Christmases in a row is it worth the upheaval okay these are choices and and so this is not I'm so the bitter realities I actually don't see that an evolutionary perspective makes it bitter it may bring things into greater focus so that hopefully we can make wiser choices because we understand the realities better than we did before what a great response er I mean I I can relate to this question because when I first heard about evolutionary psychology I experienced a little bit of this burden bitterness myself and iater realized after hearing your talks and your lectures and more more correct evolutionary theory that I was living in a fantasy world eventually you know everyone's going to be asked conscientious as they need to be and everyone's going to be you know about the same level of extraversion what you know whatever the personalities rhyme I dream fantasy world of being a perfect world and evolutionary theory was basically saying no that's that's not what we're could after and you may not get what you want despite what your best efforts are and so just fascinating right got it yeah that's interesting I'm glad you're sharing that because I think I think these kinds of sort of a lack of acknowledgement and sort of respect for and actually I don't know what you would how other to phrase it peace with the fact that life is limited and life is competitive and those I think a great deal of of what of commentary and education is about pretending like life is not competitive and it quite simply is and evolutionary psychology is the is the ultimate perspective that brings this into very very sharp relief and clinical evolutionary psychology which is what I do is the notion of rolling up our shirt sleeves and facing that reality very clearly and understanding that if we're here to compete then it makes sense to to focus carefully on the on the factors that we can control and then go out there and compete as effectively as we can and that that is not sort of that is not the stance or the typical approach to psychotherapy approaches typical approach to psychotherapy is that you've been injured somehow by some you know some some style of perpetrator or bad luck has damaged your your little soft sweet self and that somehow I don't know you need to be comforted and healed out of this it's a very interesting almost mothering notion of this and it's it's inaccurate the truth of the matter is is that did we can we need to be kind and sensitive to do psychology well but the most important thing that we need to do clinical well is to under to help people understand how they can become more competitive and we have to understand that that's what we're doing if we're likely to be able to do that project very well dr. Lila takes a lot of guts to do what you do so ya know I don't know about that I just didn't see any other way to do it okay let's go on all right now okay dear dr. Lila the episode where you explain how our beliefs are not always in line with the truth in order to stay with the village blew my mind do you ever think about how going deep in the currently male-dominated field of evolutionary psychology is bad for quote casual mating it brings up some uncomfortable truths that are not currently accepted by the village do you often find that it's better to shut up in most conversations about this well let me see about this I don't I really couldn't say the the truth is is that mating competitions are so so varied I'm not I'm not going to bring this up at a I don't I don't even know what to say about this question the truth is I always bring this up and the exhibit the notion is that for me I recognized that like all of us I'm a niche marketer and the I'm certainly going to bring up in any situation the most interesting things that I might that I might be able to bring to the table and if that sort of scares it off people are weirds them out about me well so be it the truth of the matter is is that the I personally have had enough experience in the world to know that when these concepts are are explained with a with it with sufficient with a sufficient degree of sensitivity and it's a degree of excitement and wonder then a great many people find them fascinating and they just want to know more so uh if people are disinterested for various and sundry reasons then I'm in the wrong place anyway so no problem however it's all depends upon who it is that you are and what your game is but but my game is to attract people into my life generally that would be inherently fascinated with such ideas and so clearly I'm never going to I'll shut my mouth up I'm just trying to have a pleasant conversation with somebody and not even bring up anything controversial because I'm just trying to get out of there in the next twenty two minutes and on to something else but if I'm if I'm actually in a position where I'm trying to make contact with people and have them be more interested in me for whatever reasons then yes this is this stuff is going to come to the forefront politically uncomfortable or not yeah I'm curious what you would you would do I was at a little get-together yeah a few weeks ago maybe even a few months ago and I like to talk about this stuff and and once a while it leaks out even in some inappropriate times when people don't really want to hear it so you know that but in this particular case people were interested it was it was fun we were talking and then all of a sudden the conversation shifted - oh that's cool like have you heard about the alkaline water and you heard about this and you heard about all right the the open you know a lot of people here were oh very open experience high openness yes I'm curious how how would you handle something like that where the conversation now is oh here's a new idea and here are some other new ideas but they are completely unscientific and not supported by data do you find yourself kind of contradicting it you're asking doing the Socratic method around it or do you just kind of let them you know work itself out or what sort of wandering into a whole conversation like if this is some female across the table from me at dinner and I fired by my salvo of the dug down load and then what I get back is pleasant smiles and then we start hearing about alcohol alkaline water this all depends on how attracted female is the ie well I guess is only a one variable parameter at that point so yeah I mean I'm certainly pleasant enough to I'm not going to just I'm not going to be cracking people's heads open and educating them about everything under the Sun but the the notion here of the question question that this person was asking is you know are you better off shutting up and the that's about you and your individual personality and what you're seeking in this world and who you might be seeking these concepts are to me inherently unbelievably interesting and so the it isn't necessarily we're going to come full force with the notion of causal mating versus pair-bond right in the middle of date one but we might come with for example things that are interesting thing about human aesthetics about this is this is where the kind of place that I begin to to essentially educate anybody about this field is I'll start by explaining that what people find attractive in landscapes is not random that it actually matches the African savanna where these jeans were born and I talked about the advantage that we'd like to look down on the scene so that we can have an advantage over predators and competitors and I explained that all the art in the world any landscape that they'll ever see painted or photograph always has the gravitational epicenter of that painting below the level of the observer etc etc and as I rattled things off this you see essentially the activation of the source code as people's memories walk their way through what they're hearing and they cannot find any contradictions and in in four minutes as you string together as I spring together a series of observations that were unknown to psychology nowhere in psychology did anybody ever prop prior to you know 1992 with the publication of the adapted mind nobody was thinking this way and so as you start to string this together people realize oh my god there's such a thing as actually understanding human nature and and an excitement and a bright person or a curious person wakes up and if it doesn't if it doesn't wake up it doesn't wake up hey you know if you're a Salesman you're knocking on the door nobody's home you're out of luck how that works what a great example okay all right what else we got all right dear dr. Lyle is the fear the same as anxiety and do highly conscientious people have more fears and phobias fears of heights or animals like spiders snakes rats seems perfectly reasonable but just sometimes overblown in some people yes fear and anxiety there it is the same thing these are just human beings are using words and human beings can often have thousands of words for a single concept and so somebody might say oh no dr. Lou I won't have anxiety it's not the same as fear well really what are you anxious about well I'm anxious about my test tomorrow what do you what are you thinking well I'm thinking I might not pass it oh then what why would that be bad well then I'd be in a lot of trouble because this or that I would get my scholarship or funded then I'd be out on the street my parents would be upset it's like well that's not fear of course it is what do you want to call it it's not the same thing it's a primal fear of being you know eaten alive by a great white shark but it's fear and what we're talking about is a it is a is a mo or mood response that's indicating the potential of loss that's what this is and so of course highly conscientious people are going to have more fears and phobias now I actually don't know data on this but I simply know that it's true so the so that this is this is the way it works so if you've got a nervous system that's more likely to you know essentially be be highly reactive to the to the worst-case scenario then certainly more things are going to hit you as worst-case scenarios that are in fact normal fears for most people like heights like like snakes and like spiders all three of those things have deep evolutionary roots in people and essentially all normal people have a fear of all of those things and obviously more more conscientious / anxious people the fears tend to be greater so that's that doesn't that's not a perfect correlation coefficient but it is definitely a positive correlation coefficient in other words that that effect is there that certainly explained the Hollywood trope of the highly conscientious detective or superhero who has all these great qualities and then they're just scared of heights as their as their weakness interesting yeah that that's uh I don't know yeah I hadn't thought of it alright let's go on what else we got all right thank you doctor awhile we got time for one more sorry dear dr. Lao you mentioned that people become more disagreeable with age as their status increases are other traits similarity similarily affected by variables such as status like not being as flaky when dealing with high status people also could you point us to some big five tests that you consider accurate whenever I look up the big five it seems somewhat different and not as integrated with evolutionary thinking as when you are talking about it let me see about this question let me try to think this through so the notion would be when you when certain variables are impact the situation does this influence human action like in the case of people becoming more disagreeable as they would age the as their status increases this of course makes perfect sense in the sense that they can now use their anger or irritability in order to get people to move in other words they they can they're more likely to now use intimidation when they're in a situation where they cannot intimidate people because they can't threaten them then they're less likely to use it so that that makes perfect sense the now the and also would you you would be less likely to be flaky when you were dealing with a high status person but of course then you were doing dealing with the lower status person this is because all of these things we almost don't have to have personality enter the mix here what we're simply looking at in this case in these cases are cost-benefit analyses so all of the the let me think where this person's going with these questions now the integration of the big five with evolutionary theory is is not you know not everybody's thinking along these lines so you're not going to see this in the five factor model literature it's just sort of FYI there's two different sets of thinking and knowledge in the world in psychology that look like they're similar but they're not one of them is going to be what we call behavior genetics which is a essentially it's mostly associated with personality research and behavior genetics is the the recognition and data that supports the fact that genes are the predominant factor in personality that is different than evolutionary theory evolutionary psychology is is a vastly broader all encompassing view and understanding it's a way of looking at psychology in general and in fact I the notion originally out of evolutionary psychology is that many evolutionary psychologists consider to be personality nothing other than random genetic noise in a system in the way that some people's ears are a little bigger or smaller than somebody else's or they're slightly further away from your head or clothes or whatever in other words just essentially random noise in the system that didn't have any systematic association with any evolutionary principle whatsoever under the random variation now that was I believe I'm accurately accurately reporting the at least the original conception of John to bein blue t cosmides about the nature of personality now now later after some people have been thinking about this it an extraordinary concept the first time that I read it was in jeffrey miller's book a few years ago called spent and Miller makes what I believe is a very very interesting case for the notion that the five factors are not random variation of a system at all in fact what they are is that they represent major cost-benefit problems for genes as genes deal to try to solve problems for animal behavior and that notion makes a tremendous amount of sense to me however I don't know David buss has attempted to integrate evolutionary psychology with personality as well but I haven't I haven't clearly understood or really appreciated I can't graph some of the things that he may be arguing but Miller's conception is the one that makes the most sense to me at this point and so yeah so I talk a lot about that because it makes so much sense to me so I'll just reiterate quickly what the notion is that Miller has and I I think it's a thing of beauty and there's got to be at least some truth in it I just don't know if it's the the whole enchilada the the concept of openness is would make sense that if you have a rabbit that is that is going to that the ideal amount of habitat for it to survey would be a hundred yards radius or diameter in its in its environment around its rabbit hole then if that was the most successful distance to get from the rabbit hole in that arena with that much cover and that many foxes out there and that much food there is some certain amount of distance or diameter for a roaming range that would be ideal if you go further than that roaming range then you start to be less numerous in the population because of the risk reward ratio is not ideal if you go less than nine hundred yards you start to not optimize your likelihood of gene survival so it would make sense that this would then fall beautifully in a bell curve which is of course what it is that we find that looks like telltale evidence that this is what is transpiring here is that it's a it's a gene distribution based on the effectiveness of these alternative strategies and so the openness certainly looks like that and the fact that the openness dimension is found in other animals that other animals personalities also vary in the same way that humans do looks to us like a personality characteristic that is that we use a label to in our to but is really solving a math problem with respect to genes survival it is a different math problem for example than how disagreeable you should be about conflicts of interest with conspecifics and so a different animal might be have more conflict or less conflict than humans do but humans have a certain disagreeable in other words they have certain conflicts of interests with other humans and they resolve those conflicts with certain amounts of essentially dominance or submission and so that we would affect we would expect to find a bell curve for how agreeable the average member of the species should be and now I'm speculating wildly well beyond anybody's data but it is interesting but we don't think that Neanderthals traded and so this could be an animal that was dead just as big a brain as a human and likely to be as smart but might have been for whatever reasons whatever you know just dicey little reasons of the history of evolution of these lineages not as friendly and not as able to trade because they might have been more disagreeable they were apparently bigger and stronger than humans so it could have been that there was sexual selection for males just being bigger and tougher and solving disputes through sheer strength rather than solving conflicts of interest by building trade relationships so so essentially there were more disagreeable species and for that reason they might have missed an important bet and not have been as successful who knows I have no idea that's just fun speculation but we can see that humans definitely of a bell curve in our population around how agreeable versus disagreeable and those are solving different adaptive problems than the openness not openness and conscientiousness would also be solving a different set of problems how much anxiety should we have about you know different levels of threats introversion extroversion is similar to the open this problem but is somewhat different because it's it's just about people etc so as we look at this I believe we see evidence we see I believe there's there's a beautiful footprint in the snow here of the of the hand of evolution that is that is pointing to the big five as the the cost-benefit cost-benefit problems for the genetic code that it is solved through random variation and that we see the solutions you know the optimal solutions at the top of the bell curves the however yeah you're not going to see that typically in the literature I first saw it was acquainted with that idea out of Jeffrey Miller's remarkable book spent Wow yeah here I was hoping that one day they're gonna have like astrological signs for pets you know but yeah I guess I guess they're not all right well I think that's enough for one night
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