#15. The Insurance of the Heart [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Insurance-like Adaptations

We live in an uncertain world, the best reason to buy insurance while you can. Insurance is too good a trick for evolution to have missed. When food is plentiful, as it now is in my country, people get obese, as they are now doing here, so that they can live on their fat during possible future hard times. They don't do this consciously; it's in their genes.

However, eating foregone during hard times has only a subtractive effect on your footprint on society's demand for scarce resources; how many kids you have affects your footprint multiplicatively. Thus, the effectiveness of biological insurance taken out in children foregone during times of plenty would be greater than that taken out in food consumed in advance.

The Role of Reputation 

Building on the multiplicative mechanism, the existence of which I am simply assuming, a still more powerful insurance mechanism exists; how well and long remembered the family name is that you bequeath to your children affects your footprint exponentially. I assume that a good or bad "name" affects the reproductive success of all your descendants having that name until you are finally forgotten. Compared to exponential returns, everything else is chump change. ("Who steals my purse steals trash." - Shakespeare)

Advance Evolution 

There remains the problem of food going to waste during times of plenty because the social forces associated with the multiplicative mechanism prevent a quick population increase. I conjecture that the extra energy available is invested by society in contests of various sorts, for example, the Circus Maximus during the heyday of ancient Rome, that act as a proxy to evolutionary selection pressure, whereby the society accelerates it's own evolution. Although natural selection pressure is maximal during the hard times, relying on these to do all your evolving for you can make you extinct; better to do some "preventative evolution" ahead of time.

Since future environmental demands are partly unforeseeable, a good strategy would be to accelerate one's evolution in multiple directions, keeping many irons in the fire. Indeed, in the Olympics just concluded, thirty-nine sports were represented.

Evolutionary Psychology 

The power of these contests is maximized by using the outcomes as primary conditioned stimuli that are associated with the family names of the winners and losers: the secondary conditioned stimuli. In this way, one acquires a good or bad "name" that will affect the reproductive success of all who inherit it, an exponential effect. To ground this discussion biologically, it must be assumed that the contests are effective in isolating carriers of good or bad genes (technically, alleles), and that the resulting "name" is an effective proxy for natural selection in altering the frequency of said genes. To keep the population density stable during all this, winners must be balanced by losers. The winners are determined and branded in places like the tennis courts, and the losers are determined and branded in the legal courts.

Photo by Steven Lelham on Unsplash