The key to evolution is the ratchet effect: random changes, with the good ones locked in and reproduced more than the bad ones. Then you don't need the eye to suddenly form, you just need slightly better and better eyes. The fucking thing has evolved multiple times! Our eyes have the light-gathering parts on the back side. Some animals have it on the front, where it gathers more light.
This is not to rule out other things, but we can see evolution in our lifetimes. You can do it with fruit flies and other organisms (see: super bugs). I remember reading about it happening with the soot on trees during the industrial revolution. The birds adapted to match the color of it, since the ones that stood out got eaten.
That is incredibly well worded. Right, the ratchet effect.
That concept actually explains most of the cultural drift that we see today. Yes it was curated to some extent, but in reality we allowed the ratchet effect to control our culture as opposed to the other way around and those that were ready took the opportunities presented to them by the evolution of our culture.
I read a similar description in a programming forum the other day talking about what common lisp is not a popular programming language. Once guy summarized it basically as not having that killer app that is making so much money forcing people to come to the ecosystem and then have the programmers version of the stockholm syndrome keep them there until critical mass is reached.
Ratchet effect. Thanks for that.
on Info Galactic (Google won't even show you the site in search results, even if you name it).
Thinking about culture, the ratchet effect would explain the often-repeated quote
Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.
The ratchet effect is only active during hard times, so people have to get their shit together or die. But then when times are good, there's less selection pressure so bad things can flourish. We need some way to keep pressure so only the good, beneficial aspects of culture endure. In nature the pressure is always on so it doesn't degenerate as much.
I have been thinking about that for a while now. Do you have any thoughts on that?
My starting point is: evolution is real, we are mamals, we are a type of mammal called a chimp, chimps are genocide / war creatures it is all they do (as do we), to understand a human you understand him like you would a dog, a cat, a horse ... or a chimp.
I have read a lot of philosophy, politics, math, science, but most of that reall is in the esoteric weeds of the issue.
The real stuff is happening in evoultionary psychology, these are the weeds we need to study.
Buuuuuuuuut, while we can learn a lot form evolutionay psychology (Gaad Saad may be a jew but thankfully he doesn't fully understand the full scope of his work and how useful it is) we don't operate on that level. We opearte a couple of levels above. I have noticed that all of us men have not been taughted and trained to to fight, how to speak in front of people, how to lead, how to manage risk ... nor even how to manage relationships.
It's as if we are children of children whose brave fathers that had the knowledge died in a long ago war and we are having to re-learn the same lessons every generation.
What are your thoughts on this?
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