Sublime

it was the size of the community that was nearest to 150.

It doesn’t require a large leap of speculative evolutionary psychology to arrive at the reasonable conclusion that Homo sapiens are well adapted to small-group collaboration.

Hume’s pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach to ethics is more promising than utilitarianism or deontology for modern moral psychology. As a first step in resuming Hume’s project, we should try to identify the taste receptors of the righteous mind.

In species in which males stick by their mates or protect their own offspring, it’s because male brains were slightly modified to be more responsive to oxytocin.

Just as it’s important to infer the nature of other people’s minds in order to survive, it’s also important to infer the nature of the physical world.

La sélection au niveau des groupes crée un mélange d’adaptations génétiques et culturelles qui augmente la paix, l’harmonie et la coopération à l’intérieur du groupe dans le but précis d’améliorer la capacité du groupe à rivaliser avec d’autres groupes. La sélection au niveau des groupes ne fait pas disparaître les conflits, elle les déplace au niv

The requirements for cooperation in a community are tied to all three moral foundations we considered above: a preference for fairness (tit-for-tat), the ability to defer pleasure (low discount rates), and loyalty to the community and its institutions (signaling trustworthiness).

Social capital refers to a kind of capital that economists had largely overlooked: the social ties among individuals and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from those ties.38 When everything else is equal, a firm with more social capital will outcompete its less cohesive and less internally trusting competitors (which makes sen

But evolution didn’t just lengthen childhood to make learning possible. It also installed three strong motivations to do things that make learning easy and likely: motivations for free play, attunement, and social learning. In