DISCIPLINE
Despite our cultural biases as Polynesians, children don't learn from being beaten. Instead, they become resentful and often incapable of solving problems without anger. Moreover, abusive behavior is perpetual and therefore cyclical. Abused children become abusive parents. I suspect one reason why Tongans and Samoans have succeeded so spectacularly in football is because of our familiarity with the physical aspect of the game. Sadly, much of that is cultural. Our young warriors relish dishing out the hits because they've grown up on the other end of it. Modern prophets have warned against the physical abuse of children. I've come to learn that children respond much more effectively and consistently when they're taught with lowered voices, without anger or threat of physical abuse.
Despite our cultural biases as Polynesians, children don't learn from being beaten. Instead, they become resentful and often incapable of solving problems without anger. Moreover, abusive behavior is perpetual and therefore cyclical. Abused children become abusive parents. I suspect one reason why Tongans and Samoans have succeeded so spectacularly in football is because of our familiarity with the physical aspect of the game. Sadly, much of that is cultural. Our young warriors relish dishing out the hits because they've grown up on the other end of it. Modern prophets have warned against the physical abuse of children. I've come to learn that children respond much more effectively and consistently when they're taught with lowered voices, without anger or threat of physical abuse.
When asked what they have been punished for
in their childhood the parents and grandparents gave consistent responses
indicating that disobedience and defiance were the cardinal sins of their
youth, and all but one of the adults interviewed said that they were beaten for
such offences. Many mentioned being showered with pebbles or
"back-handed", while most emphasised the severity of the punishments
they received, being beaten with belts, sticks, brooms, sandals, boots, fists.
But most believed that this was the most effective way to teach children proper
behaviour and that it was a necessary part of their upbringing.
"NOW REMIND ME TO WHOOP YOUR ASS! NOW REMIND ME TO WHOOP YOUR ASS...MITCH GET ME SOMETHIN" TO BEAT CHU WITH!" - MR. FREE
"I'LL BEAT CHO ASS AND DO IT AGAIN!" - MR. FREE
Librarian of Hate
Blacks are twice as likely as Whites to subject their children to severe violence.
Source: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(01)00029-0 …
#AltRight #hatefacts
All FAX, Nigga, All FAX!
HEY, I'VE GOT ONE LAST POST FROM THE RATIONAL ANIMAL CONCERNING LIFE HISTORY THEORY AND HOW IT RELATES TO YOUR LIFESTYLE AND THE WAY YOU MAINTAIN YOUR FINANCES. I'LL TRY TO POST THAT TODAY (I'LL BE HERE ALL DAY, FOLKZ). (EUROPEANS EVOLVED GENES FOR THRIFTINESS, PENNY-PINCHING, PRAGMATISM (PRACTICALITY), PATIENCE, PERSEVERANCE, AND PLANNING AHEAD (LOW TIME-PREFERENCE), HENCE THEY LIVE LIFE ON A SLOW LIFE HISTORY TRAJECTORY. MOST PEOPLES WHO EVOLVED IN TROPICAL CLIMATES DIDN'T AND DON'T!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0rz9SbzJFo
Stefan Molyneux The Gene Wars R-K Selection Theory Documentary
Black And Brown Man, I Need You To Take One Hour Out Of Your Meaningless Day And Listen To Stefan From The 2:08:49 Mark To The 3:27:02 Mark. He'll Explain To You, Black And Brown Man, Why You're Fast Life History Strategists And, Hence, Liberals (It's Because You're r-Selected).
Chances are you have heard of Stanley
Burrell, though you might not recognize him by that name or know all the
details of his fascinating life story. Raised by a single mother,
Burrell grew up with eight siblings crammed into a small apartment in
the East Oakland housing projects. To earn money, the young Burrell sold
stray baseballs and danced with a beat box in the Oakland Coliseum
parking lot. His energy and flair were so infectious that after seeing
him rouse fans while doing splits, Charles O. Finley, owner of the
Oakland A's major-league baseball team, hired eleven-year-old Stanley as
a batboy. One of the players thought the new batboy bore a resemblance
to baseball legend Hammerin' Hank Aaron, so they started calling him
"Hammer."
http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/when-destructive-behavior-makes-biological-sense
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0rz9SbzJFo
Stefan Molyneux The Gene Wars R-K Selection Theory Documentary
Black And Brown Man, I Need You To Take One Hour Out Of Your Meaningless Day And Listen To Stefan From The 2:08:49 Mark To The 3:27:02 Mark. He'll Explain To You, Black And Brown Man, Why You're Fast Life History Strategists And, Hence, Liberals (It's Because You're r-Selected).
By
age twenty-seven, Stanley had channeled his performing energies into a
career as a superstar musician, known to the public as MC Hammer. The
masses went wild over his flamboyant dance moves, trademark parachute
pants, and hits such as "U Can't Touch This." In 1990, Forbes magazine
estimated that the once-poverty-ridden Burrell, having sold over 50
million records, was worth $33 million.
Yet
only a few years later, in 1996, Burrell was forced to file for
bankruptcy. He had not only lost all that fortune but was now $13
million in debt. While Hammer was an adept master of ceremonies (earning
him his "MC" moniker), he could not master the concept of saving.
His expenses included a Xanadu-like twenty-acre California compound
complete with tennis courts, two pools, a built-in movie theater, a
seventeen-car garage, and a sound system that required twenty-two miles
of wiring. He also felt compelled to purchase several racehorses, a
helicopter, and solid gold chains for his four Rotweilers. But he didn't
limit his lavish spending to himself: maintaining the Hammer hype
required an entourage of two hundred people at a yearly cost of $6.8
million.
M.C. Hammer is not unique in his journey from rags to riches to bankruptcy. According to an article in Sports Illustrated, 78
percent of professional football players will go bankrupt in their
lifetimes, and 60 percent of pro basketball players are broke within
five years of retirement. This is despite the fact the
minimum yearly salary in the National Football League is $375,000. And
for players in the National Basketball Association, the average salary
is a whopping $5.15 million a year.
"Conspicuous consumption by men primarily reflects an interest in short-term mating rather than long-term mating. This is accurately detected by females who consider conspicuous consumers more desirable as short-term (but not long-term) mates."
Where
does all the money go? New York Knicks center Patrick Ewing once
explained it this way: "We make a lot of money, but we spend a lot of
money too." Boxer Mike Tyson epitomized the big-spending athlete,
dropping $188,000 for two white Bengal tigers (to wrestle for fun),
shelling out a cool $2 million for a single bathtub for one of the
thirty-eight bathrooms in his mansion, and buying a house with seven
kitchens and its own nightclub - only to stay there one night. Although
Tyson earned over $300 million during his fighting career, he was over
$24 million in debt when he filed for bankruptcy in 2003.
The compulsion to splurge is not limited to athletes or entertainers. The book The Millionaire Next Door reveals
that many well-respected professionals, including doctors, spend more
than they earn, often ending up broke later in life. Even longtime CNN
interviewer Larry King was forced to declare bankruptcy when he couldn't
pay his debts, although it didn't prevent this former poor boy from Brooklyn from racking up still more debt - and more wives (King is currently on his eighth bride).
Why do so many people who strike it rich not only fail to save for the future, but spend so outlandishly beyond their means?
Although many of these impulsive choices might appear foolish and
irrational, let's consider how living for the moment and spending like
there is no tomorrow may reflect a deeper rationality.
Here we examine the evidence that different people are disposed to
follow very different strategies in life. Some, like M.C. Hammer, aspire
to race up from rags to riches, following a "fast" trajectory
associated with risk taking, impulsivity, and a dangerous lifestyle that
can often lead to early death. Other are on the "slow" path, which
involved delaying gratification and playing it safe. Neither
strategy is intrinsically better; rather, each one makes the best of the
circumstances into which people were born. Understanding these two
strategies - and the circumstances that produce them - is important
because they explain why the same decision can be irrational and
maladaptive for one person, yet completely rational and adaptive for
another.
…
The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think
The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think
THE WRITING IN BLUE CORRESPONDS TO THE FAST STRATEGY, WHILE THE WRITING IN RED CORRESPONDS TO THE SLOW STRATEGY. MOST OF YOU NIGGERS AND OTHER COLORED PEOPLE WHOSE ANCESTORS EVOLVED IN TROPICAL CLIMATES AND WHO NOW LIVE IN IMPOVERISHED, URBAN ENVIRONMENTS EMPLOY THE FAST STRATEGY (YOU PLACE MORE EMPHASIS ON SHORT-TERM GAINS AND GOALS AND THUS REPRODUCE AT AN EARLY AGE). I'VE TRIED TO COURT FEMALES WHO EMPLOY THE FAST STRATEGY, BUT IT TYPICALLY DOESN'T WORK OUT. WHY? WHY DO YOU THINK? I'M SLOW THEY'RE FAST. I GREW UP IN A STABLE, SOMEWHAT PRIVILEGED, HIGH SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS, TWO PARENT HOME IN WELL TO DO NEIGHBORHOODS. THEY DIDN'T. (GRIP THAT AZZ HELLA FAST...MAKE IT HAPPEN QUICKER...SLOW WINE...THE WINE'S BEEN DRUNK YOUR TIME IS UP...)
According to life history theory, the fundamental tasks of life for all organisms are divided into two broad categories: somatic effort and reproductive effort. Somatic effort is the energy an animal expends to grow and maintain a healthy body (the "soma"). Reproductive effort is the energy spent to replicate the organism's genes.You
can think of the somatic as like depositing money into a growing bank
account. Reproductive effort, on the other hand, is like withdrawing
money from that bank account to spend in ways that will help replicate
one's genes. Just as people don't save money merely for the sake of
generating a large bank account, animals don't invest in somatic effort
merely to have a large body. Instead,
investment in somatic effort is investment in future reproduction. By
building a larger bank account now, an animal can create more successful
offspring in the future.
Life history theory highlights how all animals make the same underlying trade-offs. At any one point, you, your pet cat, or the sparrow nesting outside your window can spend limited resources on either somatic or reproductive effort.
Different animals resolve this trade-off in different ways, leading to what are known as different life history strategies. Some animals follow a "slow" life history strategy, investing a great deal of time and effort in somatic development before turning to reproduction. Other animals follow a "fast" strategy, skimping on somatic investment to reproduce faster. For example, tenrecs (hedgehoglike mammals found in Madagascar) are on the fast path, reaching sexual maturity only forty days after birth. As soon as they are physically capable, tenrecs become prolific replicators, generating litters of young as large as thirty-two at a time. Elephants, on the other hand, are on the slow path, taking a hundred times longer to reach sexual maturity. Even after they are physically ready, elephants might wait years more to produce young. And when they do finally get around to it, they have one offspring at a time and then wait many more years before making a sibling for little Dumbo.
We humans are closer to elephants than to tenrecs in our life histories. We invest a great deal in somatic development, biding our time before we reach sexual maturity. Even after our bodies mature, we may wait anywhere from a few years to many decades before having children. And like elephants, we typically dedicate a great deal of energy to parenting, caring for our slowly maturing, large-brained babies - helpless little things that historically have not thrived without resources provided by both mothers and fathers.
In fact, for elephants, humans, and any animal that gives birth to relatively helpless babies, reproductive effort is about much more than just copulation. Successful reproduction is subdivided into two very different tasks: mating effort (energy resources spent on thinks like competing for status, attracting a mate, and copulating) and parenting effort (energy resources spent to ensure that their offspring are capable of surviving and reproducing on their own). Human life histories, like those of elephants, involve a lot of growing, a bit of mating, and then a lot of parenting.
...
So which strategy is better: taking large risks in hopes of winning big now or playing it slow and steady to reap rewards later?
To all you college-educated types who read books about rational animals, it may certainly seem like it's smarter to resist the temptation of an easy but highly unlikely big score, and instead control your impulses and delay gratification. After all, slow and steady wins the race, doesn't it? This is why our parents want us to get an education in a practical field like accountancy and find secure employment rather than dropping out of school to start a risky new business or become a rock musician.
But the answer to the question of which investment strategy is better is neither that simple nor that obvious. In fact, it relates directly to the life history strategies we discussed earlier. Asking about how best to invest your money is very much like asking whether it's better to follow a fast or a slow life history strategy. As we discuss below, the answer is, "It depends." And when it comes to people, an evolutionary perspective suggests that some may be better off running at full speed rather than trudging along slowly and steadily.
FAST AND SLOW PEOPLE
Recall
that some animals, like tenrecs, follow a fast life history strategy
(investing very little in somatic effort and instead focusing on mating), while other animals, like elephants, follow a slow strategy (investing heavily in somatic effort and delaying reproduction). Life history theory emphasizes that neither strategy is inherently better. Instead, each is evolutionarily suited to different environments.
Fast strategies are adaptive in environments that are dangerous and unpredictable, like that of tenrecs, whose life is treacherous and uncertain. Not only must tenrecs endlessly scour for dinner in a desiccated Madagascar desert, but predators lurk behind every bush, on the lookout for a delicious tenrec dinner themselves. For critters living in a dangerous and unpredictable world, following a fast strategy is a necessity. If they delay investing in reproductive effort, they risk not reproducing at all. Tenrecs simply can't afford to build a larger bank account, because they might not be around later to spend their savings.
Slow strategies, on the other hand, are adaptive in safer and more predictable environments. Unlike tenrecs, elephants feed on a predictable diet of regional vegetation, and their massive size and power protects them from most predators. The adaptive strategy for elephants is to take their time, grow, and learn more about their world. With the luxury of being able to pad their somatic bank account, elephants invest more in somatic effort, thereby making themselves more competitive as mates in the future and, ultimately, better parents.
But here is where things get even more interesting. Differences in life history strategies don't just apply across different species. Individual animals withing a given species also differ in their life history strategies. Some elephants and tenrecs reproduce later. The same is true for humans. Although humans are relatively slow compared to other species, some people start families earlier, and others start them later. In the united states, for example, although the average age of first-time mothers is twenty-five, more than one in five first births occur to women under age twenty, while one in ten occur to women over the age of thirty-five. Some people are faster than average; others are slower. And on closer examination, these differences are not just random variations in whether or not a woman happens to become pregnant. Instead, fast and slow strategies are associated with vastly different psychologies and vastly different orientations toward everything from family to sex to money.
Slow strategists tend to be late bloomers. They actually grow up less rapidly, start puberty at later ages, and age biologically at a slower rate. They start having sex later in life and have fewer sexual partners, preferring monogamous relationships. People on the slow path also tend to have fewer children, to have them later in life, and to be married when they do so.
In sharp contrast, people on the fast track grow up more rapidly, start puberty at earlier ages, and age biologically at a faster rate (if you've ever been to a high school reunion, take a look at how some people look a lot older than others, even though everyone is the same age). Fast strategists are sexually precocious, having their first sex at an earlier age and having more sexual partners both earlier and later in life. Lots of sex often results in their having children earlier in life and in having more of them. People on the fast path are also more likely to be single parents, either because they never settled down or because they have divorced - an outcome made more likely by the fact that fast strategists are attracted to other fast strategists, who are quicker to move on to new mating opportunities.
Fast and slow people also have different personality traits. Whereas slow strategists are long-term planners, delaying immediate gratification to increase future payoffs, fast strategists are short-term opportunists, taking immediate benefits with little regard for long-term consequences. The cautious and calculated trudge along in the slow lane, while the reckless, the horny, and the shortsighted zoom by in the fast lane. As the noted lyrical philosopher MC Hammer said during his rapid rise to fame and fortune, "U Can't Touch This"!
RAISED TO RUN
Why do some people follow a fast strategy while others follow a slow one? Part of it has to do with the genes inherited from our parents. But another part has to do with our environments. In particular, our life history strategies hinge on the environment we encountered early in childhood.
Developmental psychologists Bruce Ellis and Jay Belsky have found that two aspects of our childhood environment are critical in determining our life history strategy. First, strategies speed up if people grow up in dangerous environments - places rife with violence or disease. A study of 170 different countries found that local mortality levels (the likelihood of death) were strongly related to the age at which mothers had children, with higher mortality leading to much earlier age at first birth. In Niger, for example, which has the fourteenth-highest death rate in the world, over 50 percent of women have had their first child by age eighteen. In Vietnam, which has a low death rate, 165th in the world, only 3 percent of women give birth by age eighteen. Similarly, in a study of Chicago neighborhoods, the median age of mothers giving birth was 27.3 for the ten neighborhoods with the highest life expectancy but only 22.6 in the ten neighborhoods with the lowest life expectancy. Life history strategies are merely related to general crime. When we examined records for 373 counties in the United States, we found that earlier age of first birth is specifically related to higher rates of physically dangerous violent crimes (homicide, assault, rape) but not property crime (theft, car theft, burglary). And the pattern persisted even when controlling for income.
The
second factor that speeds up life history strategies is being raised in
a fluctuating environment. Environmental fluctuations include
frequently moving from place to place, having an unpredictable income,
or seeing different people move in and out of the house. For example,
girls living in a household without a consistently present father figure
start puberty earlier - they begin menstruating, on average, nine
months before girls who have a consistently present father figure. Earlier onset of menarche is a clear marker of a fast strategy. Similarly, having an insecure and more unpredictable relationship with one's mother in infancy is also linked to earlier onset of puberty.
And just like those of dangerous environments, the effects of
fluctuating and unpredictable environments remain strong even when
researchers control for socioeconomic status or genetic factors, such as
the mother's own age of menarche.
Just as we saw for tenrecs, it has been evolutionarily adaptive for people in dangerous and unpredictable environments to follow a fast strategy. Such environments are associated not only with a shorter lifespan but also with uncertainty about where resources are going to come from - or if there will be any resources at all. A fast strategy emphasizes getting the rewards and cashing them in immediately. In a dangerous and unpredictable environment, this can be adaptive, since you don't know whether you'll be around later to enjoy the benefits of compound interest on long-term investments. For the same reason, investing time and energy in acquiring skills and knowledge (such as getting a college education) makes evolutionary sense only if a person expects to be around for awhile. If not, evolutionary success may be better served by foregoing the time, effort, and cost associated with education and instead expending those resources on tasks with more immediate evolutionary payoffs - like reproduction.
Our childhood environments serve as blueprints for what we can expect as adults. When Jeff Simpson, Vlad, and their colleagues examined what kinds of childhood experiences were most associated with a fast strategy in adulthood, they found that the experience of living in a fluctuating environment during the preschool years was the strongest predictor of having more sexual partners, being more aggressive and delinquent, and having a criminal record as an adult. The importance of the first five years suggests that even if our young minds are not consciously ready to analyze what's happening around us, our brains are nevertheless encoding what's going on. If you're being raised in a world where there is little you can do to avoid violence, and it's impossible to know what tomorrow might bring, you need to make the most of today. And if access to resources is unpredictable, a "get while the getting's good" attitude may be evolutionarily adaptive.
It's no coincidence that many people who live fast come from difficult childhoods. MC Hammer, Mike Tyson, and Larry King have all lived fast. They also grew up in poor and dangerous neighborhoods (in the East Oakland projects and the tough Bedord-Stuyvesant and Bensonhurst neighborhoods of Brooklyn, respectively). Each was raised by a single mother after his father either abandoned the family or died, and each had to find ways to get what he needed (Tyson had already been arrested thirty-eight times by age thirteen).
These kinds of harsh and fluctuating early-life environments calibrate the brain to enact a fast strategy - the kind adaptive for evolutionary success when life is expected to be nasty, brutish, and short. Looking through an evolutionary lens, it becomes clear why these three men started spending their monetary windfalls as soon as their money hit their bank accounts: their brains were calibrated to live fast because they did not know what tomorrow would bring. Not only do the majority of people who win the lottery come from poor and unstable backgrounds, but many lottery winners go on to lose their fortunes within a few years. By contrast, growing up in a safe, stable, and predictable environment calibrates the brain to enact a slow strategy. It pays to go slow and steady when you know what's coming next and you're expecting to be around to reap the fruits of your labor.
...
So is it always wise to delay gratification and play it slow and steady? Or might it be wiser instead to take large risks in hopes of winning big now? From an evolutionary perspective, the answer depends on whether one is following a slow or a fast life history strategy.
If life were an athletic event, slow and fast strategists would be participating in completely different races. Slow strategists are on a long march. A defining feature of slow strategies is their low variance. This means that few slow strategists will end up as millionaires, but few will end up bankrupt either. Instead, there is relatively little variability in the slow game - the vast majority of such strategists find themselves somewhere in the middle, with decent, stable jobs, perhaps a white picket fence, and a small nest egg. Slow strategists are the backbone of every community. They include many of our teachers, administrators, nurses, middle managers, and accountants. These are not freewheeling types throwing money around or swimming in massive amounts of debt. They live within their means and expect to be alive to enjoy the fruits of their labor in retirement, when they finally get to cross the finish line of life's long march.
Fast strategists, on the other hand, are racing in a sprint hurdle. They have to dash rapidly and jump high in hopes of clearing the many impediments that are likely to trip them up. A defining feature of fast strategies is their high variance. Compared to those on the slow path, more fast strategists will come up from the streets to become millionaire movers and shakers. These are the visionary artists, entertainers, and entrepreneurs - of both the legitimate and illegitimate varieties. Through fearless enterprising, and maniacal hard work, and a lot of luck, some fast strategists like MC Hammer, Larry King, and Mike Tyson rise to the top. But while a few fast strategists will taste success, even if for a short while, many more will crash and burn. The same riskiness and shortsightedness that lead some to rise to the top lead many more into debt, debilitating addiction, or prison (Mike Tyson, for example, was prosecuted for rape, and Larry King was arrested for grand larceny).
Some fast strategists won't even live long enough to spend their "easy-come" fortunes or go to prison. That's because living the fast life is inherently dangerous. The same traits that produce ambitious entrepreneurs, visionary artists, and attention-grabbing entertainers can lead to massive health problems and tragic accidents.
The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think. Kenrick, Griskevicius, p. 117-119, 120-121, 131-136, 137-138.
Life history theory highlights how all animals make the same underlying trade-offs. At any one point, you, your pet cat, or the sparrow nesting outside your window can spend limited resources on either somatic or reproductive effort.
Different animals resolve this trade-off in different ways, leading to what are known as different life history strategies. Some animals follow a "slow" life history strategy, investing a great deal of time and effort in somatic development before turning to reproduction. Other animals follow a "fast" strategy, skimping on somatic investment to reproduce faster. For example, tenrecs (hedgehoglike mammals found in Madagascar) are on the fast path, reaching sexual maturity only forty days after birth. As soon as they are physically capable, tenrecs become prolific replicators, generating litters of young as large as thirty-two at a time. Elephants, on the other hand, are on the slow path, taking a hundred times longer to reach sexual maturity. Even after they are physically ready, elephants might wait years more to produce young. And when they do finally get around to it, they have one offspring at a time and then wait many more years before making a sibling for little Dumbo.
We humans are closer to elephants than to tenrecs in our life histories. We invest a great deal in somatic development, biding our time before we reach sexual maturity. Even after our bodies mature, we may wait anywhere from a few years to many decades before having children. And like elephants, we typically dedicate a great deal of energy to parenting, caring for our slowly maturing, large-brained babies - helpless little things that historically have not thrived without resources provided by both mothers and fathers.
In fact, for elephants, humans, and any animal that gives birth to relatively helpless babies, reproductive effort is about much more than just copulation. Successful reproduction is subdivided into two very different tasks: mating effort (energy resources spent on thinks like competing for status, attracting a mate, and copulating) and parenting effort (energy resources spent to ensure that their offspring are capable of surviving and reproducing on their own). Human life histories, like those of elephants, involve a lot of growing, a bit of mating, and then a lot of parenting.
...
So which strategy is better: taking large risks in hopes of winning big now or playing it slow and steady to reap rewards later?
To all you college-educated types who read books about rational animals, it may certainly seem like it's smarter to resist the temptation of an easy but highly unlikely big score, and instead control your impulses and delay gratification. After all, slow and steady wins the race, doesn't it? This is why our parents want us to get an education in a practical field like accountancy and find secure employment rather than dropping out of school to start a risky new business or become a rock musician.
But the answer to the question of which investment strategy is better is neither that simple nor that obvious. In fact, it relates directly to the life history strategies we discussed earlier. Asking about how best to invest your money is very much like asking whether it's better to follow a fast or a slow life history strategy. As we discuss below, the answer is, "It depends." And when it comes to people, an evolutionary perspective suggests that some may be better off running at full speed rather than trudging along slowly and steadily.
Fast strategies are adaptive in environments that are dangerous and unpredictable, like that of tenrecs, whose life is treacherous and uncertain. Not only must tenrecs endlessly scour for dinner in a desiccated Madagascar desert, but predators lurk behind every bush, on the lookout for a delicious tenrec dinner themselves. For critters living in a dangerous and unpredictable world, following a fast strategy is a necessity. If they delay investing in reproductive effort, they risk not reproducing at all. Tenrecs simply can't afford to build a larger bank account, because they might not be around later to spend their savings.
Slow strategies, on the other hand, are adaptive in safer and more predictable environments. Unlike tenrecs, elephants feed on a predictable diet of regional vegetation, and their massive size and power protects them from most predators. The adaptive strategy for elephants is to take their time, grow, and learn more about their world. With the luxury of being able to pad their somatic bank account, elephants invest more in somatic effort, thereby making themselves more competitive as mates in the future and, ultimately, better parents.
But here is where things get even more interesting. Differences in life history strategies don't just apply across different species. Individual animals withing a given species also differ in their life history strategies. Some elephants and tenrecs reproduce later. The same is true for humans. Although humans are relatively slow compared to other species, some people start families earlier, and others start them later. In the united states, for example, although the average age of first-time mothers is twenty-five, more than one in five first births occur to women under age twenty, while one in ten occur to women over the age of thirty-five. Some people are faster than average; others are slower. And on closer examination, these differences are not just random variations in whether or not a woman happens to become pregnant. Instead, fast and slow strategies are associated with vastly different psychologies and vastly different orientations toward everything from family to sex to money.
Slow strategists tend to be late bloomers. They actually grow up less rapidly, start puberty at later ages, and age biologically at a slower rate. They start having sex later in life and have fewer sexual partners, preferring monogamous relationships. People on the slow path also tend to have fewer children, to have them later in life, and to be married when they do so.
In sharp contrast, people on the fast track grow up more rapidly, start puberty at earlier ages, and age biologically at a faster rate (if you've ever been to a high school reunion, take a look at how some people look a lot older than others, even though everyone is the same age). Fast strategists are sexually precocious, having their first sex at an earlier age and having more sexual partners both earlier and later in life. Lots of sex often results in their having children earlier in life and in having more of them. People on the fast path are also more likely to be single parents, either because they never settled down or because they have divorced - an outcome made more likely by the fact that fast strategists are attracted to other fast strategists, who are quicker to move on to new mating opportunities.
Fast and slow people also have different personality traits. Whereas slow strategists are long-term planners, delaying immediate gratification to increase future payoffs, fast strategists are short-term opportunists, taking immediate benefits with little regard for long-term consequences. The cautious and calculated trudge along in the slow lane, while the reckless, the horny, and the shortsighted zoom by in the fast lane. As the noted lyrical philosopher MC Hammer said during his rapid rise to fame and fortune, "U Can't Touch This"!
Mood ckuhz my pops get out this weekend...
FATHERLESS AND ON THE FAST TRACK (FAST LIFE HISTORY TRAJECTORY)! THE HEAVILY TATTOOED BODY SHOULD GIVE THIS AWAY (BETRAY HIS FAST LIFE STRATEGY).
RAISED TO RUN
Why do some people follow a fast strategy while others follow a slow one? Part of it has to do with the genes inherited from our parents. But another part has to do with our environments. In particular, our life history strategies hinge on the environment we encountered early in childhood.
Developmental psychologists Bruce Ellis and Jay Belsky have found that two aspects of our childhood environment are critical in determining our life history strategy. First, strategies speed up if people grow up in dangerous environments - places rife with violence or disease. A study of 170 different countries found that local mortality levels (the likelihood of death) were strongly related to the age at which mothers had children, with higher mortality leading to much earlier age at first birth. In Niger, for example, which has the fourteenth-highest death rate in the world, over 50 percent of women have had their first child by age eighteen. In Vietnam, which has a low death rate, 165th in the world, only 3 percent of women give birth by age eighteen. Similarly, in a study of Chicago neighborhoods, the median age of mothers giving birth was 27.3 for the ten neighborhoods with the highest life expectancy but only 22.6 in the ten neighborhoods with the lowest life expectancy. Life history strategies are merely related to general crime. When we examined records for 373 counties in the United States, we found that earlier age of first birth is specifically related to higher rates of physically dangerous violent crimes (homicide, assault, rape) but not property crime (theft, car theft, burglary). And the pattern persisted even when controlling for income.
"THE H00D WUZ MA DADDY!" - JAY THE JAIL BIRD
Just as we saw for tenrecs, it has been evolutionarily adaptive for people in dangerous and unpredictable environments to follow a fast strategy. Such environments are associated not only with a shorter lifespan but also with uncertainty about where resources are going to come from - or if there will be any resources at all. A fast strategy emphasizes getting the rewards and cashing them in immediately. In a dangerous and unpredictable environment, this can be adaptive, since you don't know whether you'll be around later to enjoy the benefits of compound interest on long-term investments. For the same reason, investing time and energy in acquiring skills and knowledge (such as getting a college education) makes evolutionary sense only if a person expects to be around for awhile. If not, evolutionary success may be better served by foregoing the time, effort, and cost associated with education and instead expending those resources on tasks with more immediate evolutionary payoffs - like reproduction.
Our childhood environments serve as blueprints for what we can expect as adults. When Jeff Simpson, Vlad, and their colleagues examined what kinds of childhood experiences were most associated with a fast strategy in adulthood, they found that the experience of living in a fluctuating environment during the preschool years was the strongest predictor of having more sexual partners, being more aggressive and delinquent, and having a criminal record as an adult. The importance of the first five years suggests that even if our young minds are not consciously ready to analyze what's happening around us, our brains are nevertheless encoding what's going on. If you're being raised in a world where there is little you can do to avoid violence, and it's impossible to know what tomorrow might bring, you need to make the most of today. And if access to resources is unpredictable, a "get while the getting's good" attitude may be evolutionarily adaptive.
It's no coincidence that many people who live fast come from difficult childhoods. MC Hammer, Mike Tyson, and Larry King have all lived fast. They also grew up in poor and dangerous neighborhoods (in the East Oakland projects and the tough Bedord-Stuyvesant and Bensonhurst neighborhoods of Brooklyn, respectively). Each was raised by a single mother after his father either abandoned the family or died, and each had to find ways to get what he needed (Tyson had already been arrested thirty-eight times by age thirteen).
These kinds of harsh and fluctuating early-life environments calibrate the brain to enact a fast strategy - the kind adaptive for evolutionary success when life is expected to be nasty, brutish, and short. Looking through an evolutionary lens, it becomes clear why these three men started spending their monetary windfalls as soon as their money hit their bank accounts: their brains were calibrated to live fast because they did not know what tomorrow would bring. Not only do the majority of people who win the lottery come from poor and unstable backgrounds, but many lottery winners go on to lose their fortunes within a few years. By contrast, growing up in a safe, stable, and predictable environment calibrates the brain to enact a slow strategy. It pays to go slow and steady when you know what's coming next and you're expecting to be around to reap the fruits of your labor.
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So is it always wise to delay gratification and play it slow and steady? Or might it be wiser instead to take large risks in hopes of winning big now? From an evolutionary perspective, the answer depends on whether one is following a slow or a fast life history strategy.
If life were an athletic event, slow and fast strategists would be participating in completely different races. Slow strategists are on a long march. A defining feature of slow strategies is their low variance. This means that few slow strategists will end up as millionaires, but few will end up bankrupt either. Instead, there is relatively little variability in the slow game - the vast majority of such strategists find themselves somewhere in the middle, with decent, stable jobs, perhaps a white picket fence, and a small nest egg. Slow strategists are the backbone of every community. They include many of our teachers, administrators, nurses, middle managers, and accountants. These are not freewheeling types throwing money around or swimming in massive amounts of debt. They live within their means and expect to be alive to enjoy the fruits of their labor in retirement, when they finally get to cross the finish line of life's long march.
Fast strategists, on the other hand, are racing in a sprint hurdle. They have to dash rapidly and jump high in hopes of clearing the many impediments that are likely to trip them up. A defining feature of fast strategies is their high variance. Compared to those on the slow path, more fast strategists will come up from the streets to become millionaire movers and shakers. These are the visionary artists, entertainers, and entrepreneurs - of both the legitimate and illegitimate varieties. Through fearless enterprising, and maniacal hard work, and a lot of luck, some fast strategists like MC Hammer, Larry King, and Mike Tyson rise to the top. But while a few fast strategists will taste success, even if for a short while, many more will crash and burn. The same riskiness and shortsightedness that lead some to rise to the top lead many more into debt, debilitating addiction, or prison (Mike Tyson, for example, was prosecuted for rape, and Larry King was arrested for grand larceny).
"I'll Prosecute A Prostitute!" - Raloooooo
Some fast strategists won't even live long enough to spend their "easy-come" fortunes or go to prison. That's because living the fast life is inherently dangerous. The same traits that produce ambitious entrepreneurs, visionary artists, and attention-grabbing entertainers can lead to massive health problems and tragic accidents.
The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think. Kenrick, Griskevicius, p. 117-119, 120-121, 131-136, 137-138.
Children raised in harsh and unpredictable environments who are also biologically prepared to live the fast life will tend to develop an insecure attachment style, whereas those growing up in safe and secure environments biologically prepared to live a slower life will tend to develop secure attachment styles.
Source:
Insecure children are likely to follow a fast life trajectory, involving early reproduction and physical maturation, short-term, uncommitted relationships with partners, low parental investment, and increased opportunism and risk-taking. Insecurely attached adults do report shorter estimates of their own life expectancy (Chisholm, 1999), so there does appear to be a link between adult attachment security and perceptions of the harshness of the environment. Secure children, on the other hand, are predicted to follow reproductive strategies involving later reproduction, higher parental investment, longer-term couple relationships, and more trusting, mutually beneficial close personal relationships in all aspects of their lives.
These models also predict the specific aspects of the family environment that act as cues of security to the child. These aspects involve family stress, harmonious parent-child relations, father absence, and marital conflict. Belsky et al. (1991) proposed that rejected or insensitive parenting conveys information about the lack and unpredictability of resources, the low trust and cooperation of people in the environment, and the instability and low commitment in couple relationships (see Part II, Developing a Life History Strategy).
"LIVIN' FAST...NIGGAZ NUTTIN' ON YA ASS!" - G PUERTO RICOOOOOO
http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/when-destructive-behavior-makes-biological-sense
Studies in social science and psychology have shown people like Marvel—people whose early existences are largely defined by a lack of resources, instability, and violence—often live foreshortened lives filled with risk-taking and even crime. Vladas Griskevicius, a social psychologist at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, wants to change the way we think about people like Marvel, and the seemingly senseless choices that they make.
“The takeaway message in most of psychology is that if you grow up in a bad environment, you’re going to be deficient in some way,” Griskevicius says. “That growing up poor or in harsh conditions prevents you from flowering and reaching your potential.”
“Becoming a teenage parent may—however much most of us don’t like it—be sensible from the perspective of the person whose future is precarious.”
Drawing on core ideas in evolutionary biology and economics, Griskevicius has another story to tell. “People who grew up in a harsh environment are better adapted to thrive in that kind of environment,” he says. When you are led to believe that life has no future, it makes sense to capitalize on what you can get in the present. Human decision-making, even when it seems irrational and reckless on the surface, is characterized, Griskevicius says, by a “deep rationality.”
Studies by Griskevicius and other researchers can be seen as a response to the argument, the gist of the American Dream, that people can readily change their behavior with optimism and persistence. But the scientists’ takeaway message doesn’t rest on pessimism and futility. While adaptation to a harsh environment can lead to self-destruction, it can also sow the seeds of success.
G
riskevicius’ research relies on “life-history theory,” an evolutionary biological perspective explaining how quickly and how often organisms mate and reproduce. Every organism has limited resources in time, calories, or money, and must decide, consciously or not, where to allocate those resources. They either invest them in the future by building their own health and that of their offspring, as well as by developing relationships and knowledge, or they spend them on frequent mating, focusing instead on getting as many copies of their genes out there as they can before their lives end.
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Humans, in a life-history perspective, are closer to elephants than we are to rabbits. But there’s variation within each species. People who grow up in harsh or unpredictable conditions often unconsciously adopt faster strategies for getting through life, while people raised in largely stable conditions adopt slower life strategies.
Jay Belsky, a professor of human development at the University of California, Davis, predicted 25 years ago that growing up under conditions of adversity would accelerate sexual maturation, a prediction borne out by research.2 A 2010 study found that, on average, girls who grew up in a household lower in socioeconomic status (measured in the study as a combination of household income and father’s education and occupation) had their first period at a younger age: Their bodies sensed instability and wanted to get on with things.3
Further, in a study across 170 countries, women who lived in countries with shorter life expectancies had their first baby at an earlier age.4 The same pattern was found across Chicago neighborhoods.5Across counties in the United States, lower income and higher rates of violent crime were associated with mothers giving birth at a younger age.6 In England, deprived areas led to lower ages at first birth, lower birth weight, shorter breastfeeding periods, and a higher rate of reproduction.7 Another study analyzed the causal pathway for such effects: Among English subjects, lower socioeconomic status in childhood led to greater childhood adversity, which led to increased emotional and behavioral maladjustment, which led to a younger age of reproduction.8
To Belsky, these findings make sense. “Becoming a teenage parent may—however much most of us don’t like it—be sensible from the perspective of the person whose future is precarious,” he says. Drawing an economic analogy, he notes that saving money is generally considered a worthwhile and honorable endeavor, unless you’re in an inflationary economy.
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