Cognitive Thrift 36 – Longevity
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about grandparents, great grandparents? Those aspects of evolved creatures that live extraordinarily long periods of time compared to other creatures that can have evolutionary benefit.
Rick Rosner: People speculate that any characteristic that we have someone will speculate that it is due to evolutionary pressure. That we live 30 years beyond reproductive age because it is helpful to the species that there are grandparents and elders that have accumulated knowledge. That up to 10% of the population is gay because gay people often function in societies as nurturers.
And to some extent, these are legitimate arguments to be made. There’s a separate set of arguments to be made that extended life, gayness, are just things that arise as part of the process because there’s no evolutionary pressure for this not to happen.
That we have evolved characteristics, gender-related characteristics, and these are generally helpful to the species. For every human, there’s a mix of gender-related characteristics with – we all have characteristics.
Some of them are strongly associated with one gender than the other, but none of us has – research shows that none of has – uniformly characteristics that is associated with one gender or another. We are kind of a mix. Some people are more of a mix than others.
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