In Spite Of... | Frankly #11

The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

Nate Hagens

Natural Sciences, Science, Earth Sciences

4.8 • 555 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2022

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We are a product of evolutionary processes - certain categories of behaviors made our ancestors more 'fit' depending on the environmental/social circumstances in the past. One of these behaviors - 'spite' - is when an animal (or human) actively does something against their self-interest as long as it hurts their competitor more. In a post growth world I expect - and fear - that this dynamic will become more prevalent at micro scales in our daily lives but also - and of more immediate concern - at the macro scale of nation states. I thought it worth a short video to explain spite, to understand it, as a small thread of awareness in hopes of avoiding it. We are going to need as much pro-social (as opposed to anti-social) behavior in coming decades as possible. A short reflection, on the concept of 'spite'.

For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/frankly-11-in-spite-of

To Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocoFGelQ3vE

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, good humans. Nuclear war is in the news, where one nation damages another nation,
0:07.3	but also at a cost to themselves. Today I want to reflect on this dynamic of spite,
0:14.4	because as we head into the great simplification, we're going to need pro-social behavior more than ever. So I thought it would be
0:23.2	worth spending a few minutes reflecting on the phenomenon of spite. So let's unpack this.
0:30.1	First of all, from an evolutionary perspective, there's a concept called relative fitness. Relative
0:37.1	fitness is in ancestral times, either humans or
0:42.6	animals, what offspring survived and able to reproduce relative to one's conspecifics or conspecifics or other members of the species had an evolutionary
1:01.0	advantage over time. So if 200,000 years ago there was a human who lived to be 60 years old, and he was very happy, very healthy, very fit, but he had no children.
1:19.0	From a relative fitness standpoint, he was massively out-competed by another human who died at 28, but had four surviving children that would then,
1:34.3	in turn, to reproduce themselves. So relative fitness is leaving more copies of your genes in the
1:42.2	next generation relative to your competitors, which
1:47.0	retrospectively is the other organisms. This is in contrast to absolute fitness, which is
1:55.0	how many offspring you had, or physical fitness, which is how good shape you're in.
2:01.5	So from a biological sense, relative fitness is the currency of evolution.
2:07.1	Now, of course, we don't actively pursue relative fitness in today's world.
2:13.5	We just pursue the same neurotransmitters of our successful ancestors.
2:18.3	We're adaptation executors.
2:20.0	But I digress.
2:22.3	Relative fitness, very important.
2:24.4	So from a game theoretical, evolutionary matrix perspective, there are four types of behavior
2:33.8	in the natural world, animals and humans.
2:38.8	The first is selfishness, where I do a behavior to get a resource.
	...

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