evolutionary biology
Natural selection as an explanation, including the problem of how cooperation survives it.
FilterEveryone, all time
- AI
Alex Imas quoted
Their wordsWhich of those two people are going to reproduce, find a mate, all of these sorts of things? I think the answer is kind of clear, right? It's the second one that has the preference for other people.
↗The better AI gets, the smaller its share of the economy might get – Alex Imas and Phil Trammellyoutube.com 19th of 33 in this recording
- 4 weeks earlier
- DR
David Reich quoted
Their wordsAnd really from a statistical point of view, what happens at these times of migration is there's just huge fluctuations in frequencies, and these are extremely uninformative times for looking and detecting natural selection.
↗David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farmingyoutube.com 3rd of 26 in this recording
- DR
David Reich quoted
Their wordsIn fact, multiple analyses we do suggest that the genome is vibrating with natural selection, and uh there's all sorts of weaker effects that are there that would be picked up in larger studies even than we've done. Uh and that uh in fact, almost every position in the DNA is uh correlated to a position that in being dragged in one way or the other uh by natural selection. Instead of being quiescent, natural selection is everywhere.
↗David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farmingyoutube.com 4th of 26 in this recording
- DR
David Reich quoted
Their wordsAnd so one possible explanation for that is just that there's only a handful of generations maybe five over which the natural selection would operate. And so maybe if the selection was 2% a generation you would still only see maybe a 10% compounded effect and there's just not enough time to detect it. But the Bronze Age is not 300 years, it's 3,000 years. It's the power of compound interest and you have enough time to begin to see a strong effect.
↗David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farmingyoutube.com 7th of 26 in this recording
- DR
David Reich quoted
Their wordsAnd what you see when you look at intelligence is you see that this maxes out in the Bronze Age between 5,000, 4,000, 3,000, 2,000 years ago. And the impact in the last 2,000 years is almost nothing. There's no evidence of natural selection at all.
↗David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farmingyoutube.com 8th of 26 in this recording
- DR
David Reich quoted
Their wordsSo we just could not see a way this could happen by chance and once we saw that we really felt quite convinced that this was a real signal and that really somehow there has been natural selection to increase the genetic changes that today manifest themselves as more years of school at predicting more years of schooling.
↗David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farmingyoutube.com 10th of 26 in this recording
- DR
David Reich quoted
Their wordsBut I think it's highly likely that if natural selection was pushed pushed any of these traits in more in one direction than it is, the mean would move.
↗David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farmingyoutube.com 15th of 26 in this recording
- DR
David Reich quoted
Their wordsOur interpretation of this result is that once you slide the statistic above five, essentially all the signals of natural selection are real.
↗David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farmingyoutube.com 26th of 26 in this recording
- 5 months earlier
- JH
Jon Haidt quoted
Our readingSpirituality is a real part of human nature and central to flourishing, whether or not God exists.
Their wordsI approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence.
↗The Devil's Plan to Ruin the Next Generationafterbabel.com 1st of 3 in this piece
- 5 months earlier
- LS
Lyman Stone quoted
Their wordsAs a result, natural selection is very unlikely to have produced in humans any predisposition or preference for a certain number of births.
↗There Is No Long Decline in Fertilitylymanstone.substack.com 2nd of 5 in this piece
- 15 months earlier
- SC
Sean Carroll quoted
Their wordsWhat a large language model is trying to do is to predict text. That’s what it does. And it is leveraging the fact that we human beings for very good evolutionary biology reasons, attribute intentionality and intelligence and agency to things that act like human beings.
↗Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428youtube.com 13th of 20 in this recording
- 4 years earlier
- AP
Ada Palmer quoted
Their wordswhen plague finally diminished in Europe, not because of any advance in medicine, but because fourteen generations of exposure gave natural selection time to work
↗Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Agesexurbe.com 6th of 6 in this piece
- 13 years earlier
- MN
Martin Nowak quoted
Their wordsCooperation means that selfish replicators forgo some of their reproductive potential to help one another.
↗Nowak, "Five rules for the evolution of cooperation" (Science, via PubMed Central)pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 2nd of 3 in this piece
- MN
Martin Nowak quoted
Their wordsBut natural selection implies competition and therefore opposes cooperation unless a specific mechanism is at work.
↗Nowak, "Five rules for the evolution of cooperation" (Science, via PubMed Central)pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 3rd of 3 in this piece