Addiction to Consumerism

• Environmental degradation directly linking to our growing economy (too much stuff)
  

MEN!

• Men may be incapable of the cultural change needed to save our planet
• We need more women in charge
  

Us vs Them Mentality

• An ecologically-minded must be collective and free of racism and xenophobia

Self-deception

• Widespread discounting of scientific evidence of a man-made climate disaster

Temporal Discounting

• Humans have an instinct to respond mainly to the here and now

Aversion for Darwinism

• Evolution is still largely absent from public school curriculum

Progress Through Empathy?

• Directing our cultural evolution on a path that improves empathic instinct

Implementation of Remedies for Moral Enhancement?

• Moral education
• Institutional redesign
• Pharmaceuticals/supplements
• Genetic engineering/designer babies
• Trans-humanism

Curse of Consciousness

• Eventual mortality can be interpreted in terms of genetic fitness as maladaptive, neutral, or adaptive
• Eventual mortality anxiety is just ancient 'survival instinct' gone awry
• Fitness trade-off is the cost of consciousness

Religion

• Promise of some kind of afterlife
• Provides reassurance that the 'self' need not be impermanent, even though the body is
• Provides answers when no practical ones can be found
• Calm general fears of the unknown and unexplained, promote social order and cohesion, and hence individual prosperity of some members
  
  

Parenthood

• Perceptions of offspring and parenthood provide deep-seeded symbolism for immortality
• Leaves an 'extension of self' behind that might transcend death
• Drive to leave something significant of oneself behind

Accomplishment

• Generates recognition or status, which may be earned through dominance or prestige
• Overshadows both religion and parenthood as a domain for legacy drive
• Fuelled by attraction to things like financial wealth and consumerism/materialism
• Belonging to something "larger than life"
  

Sub-selves

• Intrinsic pleasure rewards can be evoked from intentionally seeking the sense of attachment security and self-worth
• Connected with feelings of admiration and acceptance from others, intimate relations, and close family relations

Legacy and Leisure Drives

• Human achievements and triumphs define the history of cultural evolution
• More content to endure the striving and struggling needed to reach individual goals and achievements

Source of Entertainment

• Violent video games
• Violent movies
• Playing and watching team sports

Almost Exclusively a Male Enterprise

• Violence stems from a historical desire to fiercely compete with other males for mates
• A masculine warrior mentality is a sexually selected trait
• Soldiers become hypersexual and acts of rape increased reproductive success in warfare

Self-deception:

• "Self-deception lubricates
  the psychological machinery of slaughter, providing balm for an aching conscience"
• Ancient biological dispositions to overcome the problem of killing members of our own species
  

Why Human Social Evolution is More Sophisticated than Other Species:

• Larger brain
• Particular brain structure
• Capacity for complex language
• Capacity for consciousness
• Capacity for empathy
  

Rewarded Reproductive Success

1. Secured more resources and wealth for survival
2. Secured access to more females for reproduction
3. Secured a heroic reputation within the home tribe, attracting more mates

Increased Pathogen Prevalence
is generally associated with:

• A higher degree of polygamy
• A higher fertility rate
• A higher
  preference for healthy attractive mates
• A greater sexual restrictiveness
• A decreasing range size of ethnic groups
• A general decrease in
  parental care investment

Birth Weight

• Low = more likely to reproduce early when they are adults
• High = more likely to reproduce later when they are adults
• This could reflect an evolved mechanism to adjust reproductive strategy in response to the quality of the environment

Overconsumption

• Overpopulation leads to an increase in resource utilization
• This forces us to make changes to increase carrying capacity
• Increasing carrying capacity only causes more problems for us
• It becomes an ongoing upward trend of increasing resources to compensate for more people
• How far can this go?
  

Technology Will Not Save Us

• Our genetics and motivations only lead us to reproduce and pass on our genes
• People want to believe that technology will help
• Technological advances can only increase our carrying capacity to a certain point
• There is always a limit to resources!
  

Laws of Population

• Populations can only increase to a certain maximum (AKA carrying capacity)
• Technology increases carrying capacity, but there is still a limit
• Some people will always be able to produce more than one offspring
• Approaching carrying capacity = more poverty
• Natural selection will always favour those with a higher fitness, even at carrying capacity
  

Advantageous Group Level Traits:

• Division of labour
• Coalitions
• Accomplishments

Obligations

• Having a greater obligation to some individuals over others, helpful behaviour evolved most readily when recipients are kin
• This depends on the amount of genetic relatedness (i.e. individuals care more for closely related individuals than those more distantly related)
• Incorporates a broad range of genetic relatedness, including other species
• Kin/Non-kin boundary = nepotism
• Boundary separating races = racism
  Boundary between species = speciesism
• Racism is regarded as immoral while nepotism and speciesism have been historically regarded as moral
  

Religion

• Used historically as a tool for enforcing moral societal impertinence or social order
• Individuals who believed in a religion with a strong punitive component were less likely to commit crimes
• Religious imperatives have often been used to justify immorality (i.e. empire building through mass murder and conquering of other societies)
  

Society Requires both Morality and Immorality

• Morality exists as a continuum of behaviours with varying degrees of moral sense depending on the percieved balance of costs and benefits
• 100% "Immoral" = less group level efficiency and tend to be out competed by "moral" groups
• 100% "Moral" = less stable because they tend to be easily invaded by "immoral" groups
• Both are required to ensure reproductive success
• "...the strategies that account for the emergence of homosapiens as the dominant social animal were written as a complicated mix of closely calibrated altruism, cooperation, competition, domination, reciprocity, defection, and deceit" (E.O. Wilson)

Mechanisms for the Evolution of Non-Kin Helping Behaviour

• Promotes cohesion/group success
• Confers social success
• Confers attractiveness to potential mates
• Promotes mutualism and reciprocal exchange between non-relatives
• By-product of kin-selection

Entities and Definition of the Process of Change

Proximate Cause of Change

Ultimate Cause of Change

Ultimate Source of Novelty and Variation

Entities and Definition of the Process of Change

• Biological : Change in representation of phenotype because of changes in genes
• Cultural: Change in representation of behavioural phenotypes because of changes in popularity of memes

Proximate Cause of Change

• Biological: Differential reproductive success of phenotypes through generations (natural selection)
• Cultural: Differential learning and copying success of phenotypes through generations (cultural selection)

Medium of Action

• Biological: Sex - individual bodies interact through meiosis and syngamy of gametes
• Cultural: Communication - individual minds interact through language and visual signals

Ultimate Cause of Change

• Biological: Propagation of genes that influence more successful phenotypes because of changes in nature not nurture
• Cultural: Propagation of memes that influence more successful phenotypes because of change in nurture not nature

Ultimate Source of Novelty and Variation

• Biological: Mutation in the genome
• Cultural: Imagination, innovation and creativity within the mind

Cultural Determinism

• Trait variation caused by environmental variation
• social learning
• Has no effect on genetic variation
• 'transmitted culture' ex. differences in national sports, different accents
• ex. variation in musical expression
  

Genetic Determinism

• Adaptive traits expressed because of gene expression affecting 'hard-wired' behaviours
• Human 'universals'
• Unaffected by environmental variation
• Early genetic variation of these traits was eliminated through natural selection
• ex. human attraction to sex, response to pain, response to fear, variation in skin tone, resistance to malaria
  

Denial of Death

• Evolved as a mechanism to manage the terror of perceived impermanence
• The solution to this existential dilemma has been to develop cultural world views: "...humanly constructed beliefs about reality shared by individuals in a group that serve to reduce the potentially overwhelming terror resulting from the awareness of death" (Becker)

Fear of Death

• Ancient survival instincts primed us to to feel anxiety
• Stems from an ancient impulsive fear of the unknown

Sexual Jealousy

• Men want to have sex with other mens partners but not allow his partner to have sex with other men
• Has led to rape, adultery, spousal abuse, homicide

Cheating

• There is a fitness advantage to cheating
• Allows males to decrease uncertainty of paternity
• Allows females to keep a partner who can support her family while having children by another man with superior genes

Monogamy

• There was a fitness advantage
• Bonding for the division of labour
• Reduces paternal uncertainty for males
• Good when distribution of wealth is narrow and even
• Promoted bu cultural evolution
• Rarely exists in true form

Polygamy

• Beneficial when there is a wide variation of male wealth
• For females, they may be better off being a third wife of a wealthy man than being the only wife of a poor man
• For men, they can increase their quantity of offspring and spread their genes more

Standard Science Model

• Shaped by social learning
• unaffected by genetic variation
• Biological and Cultural Evolution Interact
• blending of gene transmission and meme transmission

Evolutionary Science Model

• Genetic propensities expressed through development and interacting with the environment influence what culture is learned
• behaviour modifies selection acting back on the genome

Offspring Gender

• When wealthy, male offspring are better because they can buy wives and have a greater reproductive success to pass on genes
• When poor, a daughter is a better option because she can marry up, where the poor son will most likely be unable to find a mate to pass on family genes

Fertility and Family Size

• Wealth allows for more offspring
• The percentage of women choosing not to have children has doubled
• Women have fewer children today because.....
• There is less need for offspring labourers
• There is less need to produce offspring to care for elderly parents
• There is greater family dispersal
• There are delayed family starts due to university
• There is birth control
• There are effects of technology interfering with fertility
• There is status anxiety, the need to maintain family reputation

Sex Drive

• Men have a higher sex drive
• Natural selection has made it hard for men and women to be friends because the cost for men to overlook sexual activity is high

The Media

• Themes in the media as a reflection of human nature
• ex. films, music videos, romance novels, music lyrics
• All seem to sexualize women and teach women to be attracted to high-status males

Male vs. Female

• Differences in sexual behaviour a product of natural selection
  Reproductive fitness potential
• Females - mother of 10-20 offspring per lifetime
• Males - fathers of hundreds of offspring per lifetime
  Optimal Tactics:
• Females: choose mates carefully to maximize quality of offspring
• Males: compete for mates aggressively, seek quantity of offspring
• Males more interested in multiple partners, polygamy, one night stands

Conspicuous Indulgence

• Indulgence in wasteful possesions has fitness benefits
• Is an indicator of wealth, status and membership
• May improve their attractiveness and increase chances of reproduction
• ex. buying boats, expensive cars, tattoos

Waist Size

• Women artificially slim their waist because men prefer optimal hip to waist ratio

The Crazy Bastard Hypothesis

• Young men who engage in risky behaviour
• May be adaptive because you would rather have them as your friend then enemy

Subjugation of Women

• Dominant control over their fertility was adaptive because it ensured the women had no other sexual partners
• Horrible techniques used such as chastity belts, constant pregnancies, female circumcision, forced child marriage and rape

Trade-Offs

• Evolutionary fitness requires trade-offs in time, resources and risks
• Somatic effort vs. reproductive effort
• Mating effort vs. parenting effort
• Courtship effort vs. mate guarding effort
• Playing-the-field effort vs. falling-in-love effort

Rewards of Intellectual Pleasure

• Improved chances of survival
• Elevated social status
• Greater attractiveness to mates

Evolutionary Roots of Leisure Drive

• The need to eat, mate, rear offspring, and survive provided the evolutionary roots of pleasure-based distractions that buffered the anxiety of self-impermanence

Domains

• Obtaining food
• Obtaining shelter
• Exploration
• Maintaining social status
• Shopping/conspicuous consumerism
• Success in individual competition/team sports
• Cooperation and social alliances
• Companionship
• Family relations and affection for kin
• Sex
• Humour
• Aesthetic entertainment
• Escapism (i.e. through novels, plays, films, toys, yoga, meditation, and intoxication)

Triggers for Intellectual Pleasure

Solving nature's challenges and dilemmas

• Guiding the tribe through unknown or hostile territory
• Averting a new predator found there
• Discovering how to effectively hunt a new prey
• Discerning what newfound plants were edible

Cosmetics

• Men prefer younger women because they are more fertile
• Women use makeup as a way to look younger
  

Modern Day

• in the past women got married to secure herself and offspring. Men got married to satisfy his sex drive, for a housekeeper and cook, for childcare and for certainty of paternity
• in modern society, these do not apply
• today, many women would rather be single and not get married

Living in the "Future"

• We have a capacity for curiosity, wonder and anticipation of the future
• Feelings associated with worry, sadness and depression generally increase with age, decreasing overall happiness

Living in the "Past"

• Find comfort/nostalgia from the past
• Fantasizing about the past presents symbols that affirm one's cultural world view

Positive Thinking and Optimism

• The ability to delude ourselves into believing we are happy or deciding to be happy, regardless of life circumstances, must have provided an advantage that increased fitness
• Is informed, at least partially, by genes
• Smiling and laughing can trigger endorphin pleasure rewards all by themselves

Evolutionary Advantages of "Mental Illness"

• Depression can give people keener powers of perception and heightened abilities to assess complex or tumultuous situations
• ADHD (a rapidly-shifting but intense attention span and a taste for novelty) would have proved highly advantageous in locating and securing rewards
• Schizophrenia, autism and bipolar disorder may have helped our forebears conquer the world by embracing the unique skills and attributes that came with unusual ways of thinking
• "Melancholia is a necessary ingredient of any culture that wishes to be innovative or inventive"

Natural Selection to Blame?

• Natural selection always favours those with a higher fitness
• These individuals contribute the most to overpopulation
• Even if one person fails to reproduce, another will always compensate by having more offspring
• People with a higher fitness therefore privatize the benefits, while the costs are distributed to the entire population

Leisures and Legacy

• The amount of people seeking leisure and legacies like wealth and status is growing
• Fewer people are seeking parenthood - childfree culture
• Some people attracted to parenthood are leaving descendants
• Natural selection will ultimately favour those who thrive in their environment
  

We Can Start Now

• Humans can understand and make sense of the history of evolution
• We have the capacity to deny impending evolutionary changes

Psychological Instinct

• It isn't in our nature to let people starve and die
• Average quality of life has been increasing - but this is skewed data
• Once fossil fuels run out, we will be in trouble and quality of life will decline

Pragmatism

• Realistic perspectives are necessary to make changes
• The Earth's life support system needs time to regenerate, and can only do so if we stop over-consuming and maxing out our resources
  

Three Measures for Change

1. Increased female age to 30 at first birth
2. Decline in fertility to 1 child per female by 2045, continuing past 2100
3. No reductions in mortality

• These all focus on decreasing birth rate and maintaining death rate
• The third measure will be difficult to overcome because advances in medical technology aren't willing to stop researching ways to prolong life
• It's not in our instinct to allow people to die