A great and timely quote over at Vox’s:
From Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by E.O. Wilson
The availability and quality of food can also move groups along behavioral scales. Well-fed honeybee colonies are very tolerant of intruding workers from nearby hives, letting them penetrate the nest and even take supplies. But when the same colonies are allowed to go without food for several days, they attack every intruder at the nest entrance. In general, primates also become increasingly intolerant of strangers and aggressive toward other group members during times of food shortages.
Know the mechanism. Pleasure/dopamine shuts off the amygdala. The amygdala, once shut off, functions differently, and produces less drive to conflict. But the amygdala discomfort which drives conflict also drives one to sacrifice for loyalty, which is what produces the high rearing drive. Fail to rear your child optimally, and that is your amygdala acting up. And the amygdala is also the brain structure which is responsible for sexual arousal.
So alter that one structure’s function using resource availability, and you alter the drive to conflict. But you also alter loyalty, rearing drive, and sexual drive, and together that is the full suite of r/K drives. It is the K suite of aggression/competitiveness/protectiveness, monogamy, two-parent high rearing, which produces later sexualization of offspring, and loyalty to group. And it is the r-selected suite of conflict-aversion, promiscuity, single-parent low-rearing, which produces early sexualization of young, and no drive to group loyalty.
That is all from a shift in the amygdala, and it reflects dopamine’s effects on the structure, and resource availability’s effects on dopamine.
What bothers me about Wilson’s quote is that it acts as if shortage and glut merely tweak one small urge in a person to either fight or not fight, as if it were changing a preference for chocolate or strawberry ice cream.
But look at ideologues. Look at the left and the right. Look at how those people are not similar people who are divergent in one small urge. They are very different people, very different personalities, and each absolutely hates the other with a passion. Look at how a change in the amygdala changes everything. These differences are what make history.
As you delve into it, you will begin to see the difference between the builders of civilization and the destroyers of it. You will see the embrace of family and love for the young, and selfish destruction of all of it. You will see the creation and embrace of one’s culture and national identity, and a burning desire to destroy it. You will see the desire to let everyone attain their own happiness, vs the drive to destroy happiness for everyone. You will see early America, vs modern day Venezuela. As you get to the bottom, you begin to see good vs evil.
It is the biggest insight into the human condition since the Bible.
r vs. K is in the Bible. The Israelites sacrificed their best animals to create temporary artificial scarcity to remind them to keep the Commandments and maintain their Covenant. The Canaanites sacrificed children in fire to Moloch. The Israelite way was K, the Canaanite way was r. The Canaanite sacrifice was random and intended to allow more sexual depravity. The Canaanite priests (called baals) would then eat the sacrificial remains the same way Israelite priests ate sacrificed animals. This is how we get the term Cannibal. Unfortunately the Israelites later mixed their worship and the Almighty cast them into exile.
Also note, there are people in the world today still following the Canaanite way. They just run Planned Parenthood and edit Wikipedia pages. The word “Cannibal” has been used for well over 1,500 years- it is not derived from the Spanish word for “Caribs”, you can’t get a strong “n” sound from an “r” sound in less than 500 years, ask any linguist. That’s just the Canaanite-baals trying to cover their tracks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_cannibalism#Etymology
Wow. Nice analysis!
Amazing!
Thanks for that fren!
thank you for posting that. you are also very correct. have studied Hebrew history for much of my life and the scholars have stated this very fact for as long as i can remember.
also one notices a lot more physical discipline of children in r-type groups or societies. k’s tend to only use such as a last resort with much trepidation and create more structured and disciplined and parental involved environments which make it much less necessary. k families bond and like my own, see their parents as wise. often we can be rebels without being rebellious. r’s tend to use physical discipline and talk about it a lot to make themselves seem like strict and disciplined people when often it is a way of dealing with children who are more of an annoyance to them at best something to be tolerated as a gateway into respectable life. there was an explosion of the discussion of the “goodness” of physical discipline and other excessive punishment models during the spoiled 1980’s. parents were too distracted by materialism to have time for their children’s needs. so beat the hell out of them; they don’t really matter anyway. you see this a lot with certain immigrant groups from r societies, which is often most of them. one of my hacks with these parents is to call them fuck-up disciplinarians. they get it and it burns as they know that their priorities are messed up. you even saw it in some schools which were geared towards these communities. you can see the junior Canaanite in them and wonder if they secretly would like to sacrifice their children. some even openly use terms like kill to their children in rage. yet they manage to look like “conservative” people while doing this. be wary of supposed trad people who use specific things to prove their status; they are good liars.
Bravo. You are my intellectual hero! I thought I was smart but you beat me by a mile.
I like how you point out the news stories with an r/K basis rather than turning this into a news site. I find i am seeing r/K stuff everywhere in my life. Thanks!
Keep your brilliant essays coming.
Thank you!
I find this site (and his book) to be eye opening too. I find r/K everywhere. It helps me understand life.
Interesting, I am still in doubt about the amygdala’s capacity to grow later in life, but the honey bee seems to suggest it can. Good.
Well, if a particular person’s amygdala can’t grow anymore and their surrounding environment turns K enough that it can’t calm itself down, the person will probably die from suicide or from a lack of looking after itself (if the person is always panicking, how is it going to be able to use their brains for finding food, plan for what needs be done, etc?)
OT (sorta) https://aeolipera.wordpress.com/2018/04/06/predictions-of-operant-conditioning-in-r-k-strategies/