Mapping Earth as a graph with continents as nodes and connections as edges from a human migration perspective Earth looks like this Africa | Eurasia / \ Americas Oceania 2/x
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More successfully than what? The men you're raiding. They're under the same pressure. Bam! The most powerful evolutionary force has been unleashed - the arms race. In this case the arms race is for cooperation. Eventually the land gets filled to capacity of herders 13/x
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Next step? You can pack in people more densely if you switch to agriculture so that's what happens. Agriculture -> cities which are only really possible because of the breeding for cooperation that took place in the earlier steps. 14/x
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Now the selective pressure is different again; selecting for intelligence again, selecting for enough docility to avoid being enough of a danger to others that your genetic line ends via execution, enough cooperation that your city doesn't fall too cohesive raiders 15/x
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That was another big step; cooperate enough with a wide enough group of men that you can produce wealth to produce weapons for armies that are equipped with increasingly sophisticated arms and armor. 16/x
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Without going into the more recent steps this process seems to have bred in the weakness that has allowed what is basically social cancer to grow - cancer in that individual cells are prospering while killing the host. 17/x
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Touching on one point from earlier though. The nodes that are connected via an edge from the second continent are subject to the same broad forces as the Eurasian continent but the process starts many 1000s of years later. Re-introduction has entirely predictable results. 18/x
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Counterfactual speculation - if the graph doesn't have more nodes away from the Eurasian node does the cancer spread? You could make a case that it doesn't - that the evolutionary arms race forces are too strong, constantly pushing to a new local maximum. 19/x
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So maybe the filter is: Life, etc. Need isolated continents Can't have isolated continents that branch off only edge of the origin continent Who knows what the probability of development like that is? Time to start studying exoplanet-plate tectonics 20/x
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End of conversation
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