Uh oh. Brain whirring . . . processing . . .

Apes survive in nature, our chimpanzee cousins have been around as long as we have, meaning, that every existent creature has solved the problem of predator violence to some degree or they wouldn’t be here. Primates live in close groups and post sentries, all of that great science, and we also breed fairly quickly – in line with Sapolsky’s summation these days, that humans are half of everything and half of everything else, in this case, half predator and half prey in our breeding habits. Seeing us as a tournament sort of species, my uneducated and so unprincipled mind cannot stay away from postulating that the alphas and the hierarchy beneath them serve to maintain a certain selective pressure on a social animal in lieu of the predators that might provide those constraints on a less strategically minded prey. Violent selection, you know, culling of the weak and the old, that sort of thing. (I usually put a date on these things, so guess what’s putting these sorts of thoughts in my head – Rachel Maddow’s voice in my ears.) What I’m after, is, maybe the world selects for “tough,” like weakness is constrained by predation in direct contact on the savanna, and constrained by abuse in the social environment, by alphas and on down the ladder.

Jeff

April 9th., 2018