Cognitive Thrift 37 – Binary
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/15
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Well, people are not binary. People are on a spectrum, but that’s a polysyllabic statement for a trivial truth. What is the deep truth there?
Rick Rosner: The deep truth there is that under evolutionary sufficiency. Things are only as good or as ordered or as whatever as they need to be for the species to function.
And, it – apparently, our species functions fine with everybody having a mix of gender-related characteristics and with some people have more of a mix across gender than other people.
Nature is only a sheriff of characteristics and only a caretaker of characteristics to the extent that it is necessary for the species to thrive, and that leads to helpful flexibility in species, where there is no sheriff in nature that says you need to die after reproducing – so we get extra years.
There’s no sheriff saying you need to live until 120 because that doesn’t help the species, and it is whatever helps the species, doesn’t hurt the species, and whatever persists because – to some extent, we live until 70, 80, 90 because it is helpful to the species.
But we also live that long because once you build a car or something, the pieces have some excess durability just due to the nature of those things.
If you design something with evolutionary sufficiency, the sufficiency generally has some slop over that allows for extended survival and it’s increasingly debilitated survival because there is no sheriff saying – the situation is there is no sheriff saying you have to die after you are done with reproduction, and there is no sheriff saying you have keep going after you’re done reproduction, and we keep going in an increasingly debilitated form. We’re good at 40, pretty good at 50.
A little falling apart between 50 and 60. 60, 70, to 80, things get dire, and then we’re kind of a mess into our 70s and 80s, and more so – we fall apart because there’s no sheriff that says we shouldn’t. The sheriff of nature or evolution.
I drive a 16-year-old car. And I don’t maintain it that well. I get an oil change about every 7,000 miles. I don’t switch out fluids. The car will eventually fall apart, but it has been going this long.
If I was super scrupulous and it were a collector car, and I replaced everything that could/should be replaced, I could keep the car going for 100 years, but because the car was designed to last for a 10 years say, I can get more out of it because designing for 10 years generally allows for continued functioning for years beyond that.
It is that way with our bodies. It’s nit like we live for 50 years after we’re done reproducing. We live for 30, 40 years. It’s not like dog’s live to 35, even though they’ve quite having puppies at age 10. Dogs get a few extra years.
Everything gets a reasonable proportion of their lifespan extra because things don’t fall apart immediately.
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