Sublime

Bill cannot think of an activity that turns off more brain cells than tribal affiliation 

Rather than opposing “cultural” with “evolutionary” or “biological” explanations, researchers have now developed a rich body of work showing how natural selection, acting on genes, has shaped our psychology in a manner that generates nongenetic evolutionary processes capable of producing complex cultural adaptations. Culture, and cultural evolution

Scientists hypothesize that this negativity bias is evolutionarily adaptive. By remembering dangerous encounters with predators, for example, our ancestors were more likely to steer clear of them. However, nowadays this tendency is no longer necessary and often gets in our way.

It seems that risk-taking is a form of mate advertising: see how good my genes are – I can afford to take real risks and get away with it.

the history of psychology is largely a story of people and animals being compelled to do things

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.

female mammals, and primates in particular, being able to work effectively in a social environment is much more important for their reproductive success than anything

The secret of our species’ success lies not in our raw, innate, intelligence or in any specialized mental abilities that fire up when we encounter the typical problems that repeatedly challenged our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Pleistocene. Our ability to survive and thrive as hunter-gatherers, or anything else, across an immense range of globa