fil-ter

If you want a recipe for how to shut down an economy, just read what the early Ming emperors did. They nationalized foreign trade. They forbade population movements within the country, so villagers weren’t allowed to migrate to towns. They forbade merchants from trading on their own account without specific permission to do specific things. You had to actually register your inventories with the imperial bureaucrats every month, that kind of thing. And they did the usual idiotic thing of building walls, invading Vietnam.

Ridley wrote one of my favorite books, the Red Queen.

If this pans out, it would mean that men with high testosterone levels, who are known to be bigger, stronger and more dominant, are more likely to have rounder faces - and that we evolved to judge such faces as aggressive because their owners are more likely to attack us…

This obviously holds for Dwight Schrute.

… Just as an eyespot is not an eye, so a person with a baby face may not be babyish, but an observer is likely to respond as if they are, she says. It is a similar story with our reaction to unattractive faces, which she says is an overgeneralisation of an evolved aversion to people who are diseased or suffer from some genetic anomaly. There is also “familiar face overgeneralisation”, whereby people are judged to have the traits of others who they resemble…

But there’s a twist. Baby-faced men are, on average, better educated, more assertive and apt to win more military medals than their mature-looking counterparts. They are also more likely to be criminals; think Al Capone. Similarly, Zebrowitz found baby-faced boys to be quarrelsome and hostile, and more likely to be academic high-fliers. She calls this the “self-defeating prophecy effect”: a man with a baby face strives to confound expectations and ends up overcompensating.

Fast forward the video to about 45 seconds in for visuals.

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.

Yeah, I’m way behind …

Given the perils of negotiating rank, many species have evolved dramatized status contests, relying on symbolic displays of physical size and force to peacefully sort out who’s on top. Stags roar. Frogs croak. Chimps throw branches around. Hippos open their jaws as wide as possible to impress competitors.

And humans tease. Teasing can be thought of as a status contest with a twist. As humans evolved the ability to form complex alliances, the power of a single individual came increasingly to depend on the ability to build strong bonds. Power became a matter of social intelligence (the good of the group) rather than of survival of the fittest (raw strength). As a status contest, teasing must walk a fine line, designating status while enhancing social connection.

Unlike many mammals, not to mention primates, people are astonishingly successful endurance runners… not only can humans outlast horses, but over long distances and under the right conditions, they can also outrun just about any other animal on the planet—including dogs, wolves, hyenas, and antelope, the other great endurance runners. From our abundant sweat glands to our Achilles tendons, from our big knee joints to our muscular glutei maximi, human bodies are beautifully tuned running machines … Our anatomy suggests that running down prey was once a way of life that ensured hominid survival millions of years ago on the African savanna.

Since the Earth is only 5,000 years old, I don’t believe any of this, but it’s interesting nonetheless.