Cultureplaces

  by  Joseph Henrich     (Author) Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains―on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrate...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FptGxaxJyms

Published in Quillette on October 19, 2018    written by  R. P. Reed and Megan Fritts https://quillette.com/2018/10/19/consent-isnt-everything-and-sex-is-not-like-tea/  “Whether it’s tea or sex, consent is everything.” This we learn from the closing statement of a video entitled “Tea and Consent,” created by the Thames Valley Police. Over the last few years, this short and clever educational video has made its way around the internet, and Baylor University even began showing it to incoming freshmen. The video analogises an offer of tea with seduction. You only make someone tea if that person explicitly expresses a desire for tea and—the video tells us—sex is no different. While the video aims to educate men on the importance of receiving explicit verbal consent for sexual activity, it does so via a clumsy and unhelpful characterization of sex as a simple transaction. The video’s conclusion, “Consent is everything,” and the subtitle, “Consent...

Intervention might help save troubled kids. But the label could doom them. By  GARY MARCHANT OCT 17, 2012 11:19 AM A toddler feeding a stuffed toy Photograph by David De Lossy/Photodisc/Thinkstock. If you read judicial opinions in serious crime cases, which always seem to describe every gruesome and salacious detail, you will almost surely reach two conclusions. First, no “normal” person could ever commit many of the horrific acts described in those cases. Second, everyone involved would be so much better off if we could have somehow anticipated and prevented those crimes from occurring in the first place. The perpetrators themselves might be leading normal lives if their violent tendencies were identified and treated before they committed their crimes. Even more importantly, the innocent victims, as well as their loved ones, would, it goes without saying, greatly benefit from not having been murdered or assaulted. The idea that we could prevent crime by ide...

By   Scott Barry Kaufman   on   October 26, 2018 There ar e many divides in the world right now. But there's one divide, deeply embedded into the core of human nature, that helps explain many other divides. What I'm referring to is a source of human personality variation that is built right into our DNA:  antagonism . By really zooming in on this trait, and understanding how antagonism interacts with environmental conditioning and messaging, we can gain a greater understanding of one of the most prominent divides in the world today: populism. First, let's dive in to the latest science of antagonism. The Science of Antagonism The antagonism-agreeableness dimension of personality is one of the five main dimensions of personality . Like the other major dimensions of personality, this trait is normally distributed in the population. The more two people differ on this fundamental dimension, the more incomprehensible the other person's behavior may seem, ...

Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits: A Survey Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. 2004 American Psychological Society "In this review, I have addressed only the behavior genetic analysis of traits taken one at a time (univariate analysis). It is important to recognize that it is possible to carry out complex genetic analyses of the correlations among traits and compute genetic correlations. These correlations tell us the degree to which genetic effects on one score (trait measure) are correlated with genetic effects on a second score, at one or at many points in time. The genetic correlation between two traits can be quite high regardless of whether the heritability of either trait is high or low, or whether the correlation between the traits is high or low. Consider the well-known positive correlation between tests of mental ability, the evidentiary base for the general intelligence factor. This value is typically about .30. The genetic correlation between such tests is, howev...

  Troy Farah  | July 26, 2018 5:05 pm 09 This response to antisocial behavior shows the most promise.  Talk therapy plays a supportive role. A neuroscientist and a marine biologist got together and decided to give octopuses MDMA. It sounds like a joke, but it really happened, and the results reveal something unique about our neurocircuitry and human evolution Eric Edsinger is an octopus researcher at the University of Chicago who recently helped  sequence  the genome of  Octopus bimaculoides —the California two-spot octopus. Like most octopuses, this color-changing cephalopod is asocial, meaning it likes to be alone most of the time, unless it’s trying to mate. But when given MDMA, a drug well known for  boosting  emotional empathy and prosocial behavior in humans (i.e. making you really, really want to fraternize), these octopuses also seemed to want to hang out with each other, even if they weren’t trying to find a mate. T...