No, we needed culture and the technology to make warm clothing, fire, and insulated structures to be able to survive. Losing fur did not help us survive cold climates at all.

Where’s the evidence that authoritarian states have been less stable over the last 5000 years? There have been plenty of authoritarian empires which lasted for thousands of years, far longer than western democracies have even existed. We are currently in a period of increasing popularity of authoritarianism. Liberal democracy may turn out to be a blip in an otherwise authoritarian-dominated history (over the next ten thousand years).

And I wouldn’t say liberal democracies have thrived at all, evolutionarily speaking. We’ve essentially destroyed our own desire to reproduce. That’s the opposite of thriving.

The upstart queen can replace the main queen if she dies, yeah. Queens produce a pheromone that triggers the killing of upstart queens. In the absence of a queen, an upstart queen can survive and take over.

The idea with cancer being selfish comes from an idea of organisms functioning at different levels of organization. Single-celled organisms, colonial microorganisms, multicellular life, social animals, larger societies, civilizations, ecosystems, the whole planet.

Perhaps one day we may colonize other planets and form yet another, higher level of organization. How it will function is still to be discovered but I think selfishness of individual units is always a potential.

My second point above contains the seeds of what you’re looking for: humans evolved culture which enables us to function in a wide variety of organizational styles across a large range of population sizes. Huge power imbalances, the most extreme being dictatorships, are not a barrier to human survival.

The fact that humans evolved in an environment without huge power imbalances is no more relevant than the fact that humans also evolved in an environment without huge temperature variations and yet are thriving on every continent save Antarctica (we could thrive even there but we have no reason to try). We are extremely good at surviving, even if we’re not always happy about it.

There’s a few things here:

• Evolution does not care about our happiness. If an elite group of wealthy cannibals took over the world and created a vast breeding farm to produce trillions of humans, selecting for diverse genetics to produce the widest variety of flavours, textures, sizes, and strengths, then that would be evolutionary advantageous over our current situation. Domestic cattle have a huge evolutionary advantage over their wild cousins who struggle to survive at the margins of civilization.
• Humans evolved culture, which at its core represents the storage and transmission of information, much of which may provide survival advantages (culinary and cleanliness practices for example). Since that point, we’ve developed vast amounts of technology which facilitate and accelerate the transmission of information, allowing us to organize ourselves on larger and larger scales, some of which had enhanced our fitness (food production, medicine, improvements in shelter and sanitation) while others have reduced our fitness (contraceptives have pushed population growth below replacement levels).
• On that last point, I think it will ultimately be a temporary blip. Evolution does not care about happiness, so a large empire with no birth control and a growing but oppressed and unhappy population is evolutionarily advantageous relative to a liberal democratic society where everyone is happy but the population is shrinking.

Nature is cruel. Living things aren’t “meant” to do anything, they just exist and try to survive. Humans aren’t the only living things on the planet that change their environments. Microorganisms, plants, social insects, and beavers are other examples.

Try creating a new sourdough starter from flour and water to see what happens. It goes through a really cool progression of different stages which are each dominated by different species of bacteria, before settling on a mixture of wild yeasts and lactobacillus bacteria that are adapted to the acidic environment (which the micros themselves created)!

Similar things happen with the progression of forest ecosystems from early lichens and pioneer grasses to conifers and finally deciduous trees in a mature forest. It all seems beautiful and pleasant but there is much life and death going on all the time. Oh, and if you spend enough time living near forest with your window open then you’ll definitely hear the screaming of small animals being killed by predators.

I don’t find appeals to nature persuasive. Nature is full of terrifying, disgusting, and deadly things. Most of what people associate with nature (lush forests, beautiful meadows, butterflies, birds, gently flowing clean rivers, gorgeous mountains) is biased to our needs.

Nature also includes foul-smelling swamps teaming with disease-carrying insects, unclean water full of deadly pathogens, harsh deserts with no shade, no water, but plenty of deadly scorpions and snakes, hot savannahs full of powerful lions, leopards, cheetahs, and hyenas, coral reefs full of jagged rocks, deadly stonefish and box jellyfish….

You get the point. Moral judgement of humanity as a whole is silly. Your energies are much better spent trying to make things better in a smaller area around you. Oh, and a lot of human power is illusory: people refusing to act because they don’t think anything will change.

Yes, though then we’ll have to test your blood to make sure.

Yes, I just wouldn’t characterize ancient Sumeria as “modern society.” Modern society, to me, began with the Industrial Revolution.

That’s simply not true. Read about the Egyptian pharaohs or ancient kings like Sargon of Akkad. Huge power imbalances have been with us for thousands of years. They don’t depend on modern technology, just agriculture and organization.

He narrowly escapes with his life after having the idol stolen from him by his rival, Belloq, who works for the Nazis and actually hired that Peruvian tribe to be his little private army. Belloq then orders the Peruvians to attack Jones and he barely escapes on his hired plane.

The argument doesn’t specify how one achieves might. That’s an exercise for the reader. One guy sitting in a bunker with his finger over the red button of a doomsday weapon is rather mighty. A million people all working together in a coordinated hive mind would also be mighty.

The main issue for a group of humans is coordination. In general, smaller groups are easier to coordinate than larger groups. I think this is one of the biggest reasons elites can form and take control over larger groups in society. Wealth has a big effect too but this coordination problem has always existed and so have elites, at least since the dawn of agriculture.

Yeah that’s the thing. They may be more violent but are they able to maintain stable control over the country? Might dissolve into chaos anyway.

Save up your money and then move to a low CoL country that’s friendly to foreigners.

Perfect hexagons are not to spec. Notice how each hexagon is different yet they all fit together. That gives it an organic look. Makes it far more difficult to machine since now you can’t just machine a single piece of round stock into a long hexagon and then cut them off into pieces with the right thickness.

If they were perfect hexagons it would be easy. Just need a big enough piece of stock.

Yes, the upstart-queen is from within the bee’s own hive. The hive permits only 1 queen and others are destroyed. The selfishness is not on the part of the worker who kills it, it’s on the upstart-queen who is trying to replace the main queen.

In the case of body cells and apoptosis, I’d view the actual human being as equivalent to the entirety of the hive/the queen bee, in which case, the process of apoptosis is selfless from the point of view of the cells killing themselves or other cells - in theory it’s for the good of the human being as a whole.

Yes, apoptosis is selfless. Cancer is the selfishness it fights against: a group of cells in selfish rebellion against the body.

Even collective animals have to fight against selfishness. Worker bees detect and kill upstart queens. Human cells are being destroyed all the time (apoptosis). Cancer is the result when that mechanism fails.

Yes, it is a choice. However one of the biggest problems is that so many of the good choices are gone. I’m talking about the positive social institutions and community organizations people used to belong to. The third spaces.

Communities have fragmented. Neighbours hate each other. Both of my neighbours hate our family. One is a childless, alcoholic husband and wife who also hate each other (they used to be nice years ago) who also hate us and give us creepy looks all the time. The other is green lawn-obsessed neighbour who hates us for the pine trees we have growing on our property and refuse to cut down (at our own expense) to suit their tastes.

We’re a society of severely mentally ill, isolated, confused, and angry people. Our villages and communities are all gone. We’re all a bunch of islands unto ourselves.

The manosphere is one symptom of a much larger problem. Look at it in isolation and you’ll miss the big picture. Authoritarianism is on the rise globally. Loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions. Society’s traditional institutions are a distant memory. All we have remaining are loose groups of people shouting at each other as the spectre of war lurks in the background.

As a first step. Really, it’s the easiest step along that path.

The hard part is building the new order among the ashes of the revolution. The leaders of the revolution will in all likelihood want to claim the spoils of victory for themselves. Who could blame them? It’s human nature.

Ultimately it comes down to might makes right. That’s the final argument of kings (the barrel of a gun). For all the progress we’ve made we still can’t escape the account of Thrasymachus.

The dirty secret of any home reno tax credit is that the industry gobbles them up with markups. The price ends up being exactly the same as it would be without the tax credit, so it’s a subsidy for uncompetitive installation companies rather than families who want to invest in green energy.