What happened to the Neanderthals? We ate them.
The argument between meat-eaters and vegans misses the point: humans have evolved to eat cooked food.
Evolution was an idea whose time had come, with or without Charles Darwin.
“Competitive selection” is misunderstood. Natural selection doesn’t have to be a baret-toothed fight between species to see who is the most “competitive”: “it is just as likely that organisms that are smaller, weaker, slower and socially cooperative will do so as well.
Crowded societies create the opportunity for innovation. Dense populations have created major social advances since the stone age.
Nature versus nurture: The blank-slate nurturists argued against the oppressive idea that people’s lives were dictated by their genes. Those ideas were supreme in the second half of the twentieth century, but the pendulum is swinging back. Not only were they wrong, but their wrong ideas were just as bad as the ones they opposed:
cultural determinism can be just as inimical to freedom as its genetic counterpart. It implies that instead of being prisoners of our genes, we are prisoners of our parents, teachers and societies. Those who grow up in poverty will be forever disadvantaged, while those who come from privilege will retain it. Autism can be blamed on “refrigerator mothers”, and adults’ relationship problems on their overprotective families. As a world view it is quite as bleak as one based on inheritance.
Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.
Moral judgments are like that.
Gayness in nature across a range of species gives us some clues about what might be going on with gay humans.
One particularly charged finding is that in most species besides humans, same-gender pairings rarely lead to lifelong relationships. In other words, when one attractive bonobo male eyes another in a lovely patch of Congo swamp forest, they occasionally kiss and then move on to other oral pleasures, but they don’t bother anyone afterward about trying to legalize their right to an open-banana-bar ceremony.
Bitchiness is an evolved trait in girls. Women who can successfully trash the reputations of the competition get the guy and have the kids.
Evolutionarily, historically and cross-culturally, they point out, girls in the fifteen- to nineteen-year-old range would be most actively competing for mates. Thus, anything that would sabotage another females’ image as a desirable reproductive partner, such as commenting on her promiscuity, physical appearance or some other aberrant or quirky traits, tends to be the stuff of virile gossip. Also, the degree of bitchiness should then demonstrate a sort of bell-shaped curve over the female life course. On the surface this seems mostly true.