New open access paper - 'A Deceptive Curing Practice in Hunter-Gatherer Societies', exploring what I suspect is one of the oldest and most widespread healing practices/'magic tricks' in the world mdpi.com/2673-9461/2/3/
Pinned
Follow
Will
@Evolving_Moloch
Evolutionary Anthropology. RA . Blogs on violence, magic, rituals, deception. traditionsofconflict.com
traditionsofconflict.substack.comJoined December 2016
Will’s posts
I have long thought that if pretty much anyone other than Mel Gibson had made Apocalypto it would be more widely hailed as a masterpiece and considered relatively pioneering in terms of representation in Hollywood films. Great movie, and the entire film is spoken in Yucatec Maya.
Replying to
Just one thing to note since some people in the comments and QTs seem confused is that this wasn't everyday wear but ceremonial and involved impersonating different kinds of spirits.
My most centrist and self-righteous opinion is that large numbers of supremely intelligent people on all sides of the political spectrum are wasting their considerable intellects by immersing themselves in toxic and often trivial culture war psychodrama.
A great benefit of reading lot of ethnography is realizing 1) a lot of things people blame on capitalism or agriculture are found in non-capitalist, non-agricultural societies, but also 2) a lot of what people attribute to ‘human nature’ are non-universal Western/industrial norms
"Although many adults would prefer to believe that boys like weapons and fighting enemies because they are pressured into it by society, the evidence suggests that this is not true."
The class was just you and a bunch of outgroup members and they all happened to fit precisely the caricature you wanted them to? That was quite fortuitous.
Only exaggerating slightly when I say that nearly everything worth knowing about human behavior can be found in 100 year old books that are freely available on archive.org, and these works are mostly avoided by modern anthropologists.
2003 report of a 40 yr old Mexican woman, living in a small village 8 hours from hospital & unable to deliver vaginally during difficult labor, who, "using her skills at slaughtering animals...took 3 small glasses of hard liquor &, using a kitchen knife," gave herself a C-section
Liked this bit from Robert Eggers talking about The Northman thedailybeast.com/robert-eggers-
"man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun"
I wrote an article for Quillette on how a number of well-intentioned anthropologists and media commentators have perpetuated a misleading portrayal of life in many hunter-gatherer societies.
Quote
Romanticizing the Hunter-Gatherer | @Evolving_Moloch quillette.com/2017/12/16/rom
Where are the matriarchies? - "Today anthropologists generally agree that cases of true matriarchy do not exist in human society, and that they most probably never have." traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/3/17
Many in the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ have been complaining about anonymity on Twitter for years, sometimes using entirely made up evolutionary and historical justifications for why it should be banned. One of their most ‘dangerous ideas’, I think.
Quote
I am increasingly convinced that Twitter anonymity is the refuge of scoundrels and fiends. Say it and stand behind it or hold your tongue.
What if good societies are not actually made, but are instead the undirected result of a chaotic accumulation of norms and institutions that developed mostly by chance, and are largely outside of anyone's control?
Quote
hey guys imagine if we tried to make a society that was good
One of those ideas, like ‘romantic love was invented in France in the Middle Ages’ or ‘Ancient Greeks couldn’t see the color blue’, that is so ridiculous only an academic could believe it.
Quote
"Loneliness needs to be understood [...] as a relatively recent invention, dating from around 1800." journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11
Replying to
Quote
I bet people change their minds all the time as a result of the information they encounter--and interactions they have--on this platform, it just usually happens over time and isn't the result of a single tweet.
Quote
Quick reminder: none of your tweets have ever changed a single person's mind about anything
Replying to
It's crazy how much sequels and shared universe stuff tends to dominate the box office. Nope was good, glad to see a solid original film doing well.
Replying to
"unobtrusively assessed by two male experimenters who were standing in front of the participants while they were filling out the questionairre." just me and my bro, playing "hot or not", for science, you know.
Since it is the end of the year, here is a very long and self-indulgent thread on all the articles I wrote over the last 12 months
We have tons of ethnohistorical evidence showing what contemporary hunter-gatherers actually do in such circumstances. It doesn’t fit any neat or tidy ideologically comforting generalization though so it’s mostly ignored in favor of speculation from ambiguous archaeological data. twitter.com/transgabalus/s
This post is unavailable.
Most hunter-gatherer societies don’t have prostitution but the majority of them have healers/shaman, who are not uncommonly the only specialist occupation within their society and receive payment for their services, so I think that’s a better candidate for the oldest profession.
Quote
it’s the oldest job on the face of the damn earth. what generation was not comfortable???? y’all truly just be talking. twitter.com/doitmuvaaa/sta…
FYI literally none of the studies in this article actually show that, all of the research cited are based on the assumption that strong priming effects are real (debatable), and the sample sizes are comical in some cases (ex. n=13).
Quote
FYI: Becoming rich and powerful actually damages the empathy parts of your brain in such a way that you are physically less capable of caring about other people. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi
Jared Diamond’s biggest critics are left wing people who complain that he’s racist and right wing people who complain that he isn’t racist
Quote
Greetings! For my first post of the year (sheesh), I've decided to do something incredibly silly by defending Jared Diamond's *Guns, Germs, and Steel* against its critics... nearly all of them. Enjoy!
blog.daviskedrosky.com/p/jared-diamon
I'm not speaking of any discipline in particular here, but If you're in a field that lacks methodological rigor, is highly politicized, activist-oriented, and ideologically homogeneous, this seems like it would be a good excuse to hand-wave away any criticism.
Quote
Good morning. All research is political. Have a great day everyone! 
I think this Vox video on monogamy is terrible in pretty much every way, but it really hits its nadir when it implies that the concept of sexual selection was just a conspiracy invented by Victorian male scientists to justify monogamy (at 13:26) youtube.com/watch?v=DCGyLj
1) H sapiens had fire making tools & technology to process animal skins before even leaving Africa 2) multiple archaic Homo species made it to Siberia 3) dying of thirst in areas of Kalahari where there’s no surface water probably even more ruthless & novel environmental pressure
Quote
To me, the core truth of the cold winters theory is this: humans in places where temperatures get lethally cold all die, 100%, unless they figure out ways to stay warm. There’s no other comparably ruthless environmental demand. twitter.com/jonatanpallese…
My personal view is that if you're going to make claims about what hunter-gatherers do, you should at least reference a few actual hunter-gatherer societies, instead of just ignoring them completely and going off of gut instinct. Not a single one even obliquely alluded to here.
Most first marriages across recorded hunter-gatherer societies are arranged marriages where young girls (avg: ~14) r exchanged for goods or labor from older husband and/or his kin. Lot of evolutionary accounts of human mating out there that don't recognize implications of this
"...tall men are more likely than short men to sponsor rituals, be wealthy, have many girlfriends, and become village chiefs. It is they, to the near exclusion of the short, who monopolize the positions of power and influence that are intertwined with the concept of masculinity."
'Hi human evolution expert here! You evolved to purchase dumb bullshit and cheat on your spouse, now buy my book on polyamory and check out my Okcupid profile you fucking idiot'
I think it’s pretty clear there’s enough cross-cultural consistency in gender roles to demonstrate evolved bio. sex differences matter, while there’s also enough diversity in gender roles to demonstrate sex differences not the only relevant factor & lot of other things matter too
You gotta be dumb as shit to take these numbers at face value. t.co/9bSSIjtkZW
This post is unavailable.
Crazy how many social scientists when they do ‘evolutionary’ speculation will literally just *make shit up* about how our 'hunter-gatherer ancestors' lived, while evincing absolutely zero interest in understanding how contemporary hunter-gatherers live, & tons of people buy it
Every time I see someone from the Intellectual Dark Web tweet I think of that scene from American Psycho where Christian Bale is having sex with the prostitute and he's flexing and staring at himself admiringly in the mirror. Like every tweet is the equivalent of that.
Quote
Current Leaders of the alt-right, the patriarchy & White Supremacy in the US according to MSM:
@benshapiro
@RealCandaceO
@AndrewYang
@RubinReport
Why, you ask? Because taking all their traits together you could stitch together a straight white Christian male.
#intersectionality
I tend to think many anthropologists and historians are too skeptical of the ability to make broad cross-cultural generalizations while many economists and psychologists aren’t skeptical enough of the ability to do so.
I still struggle to understand how anthropologists can describe societies where young girls (~8-14) are forced into marriages with little say in the matter as having "balanced gender relations" or 'gender equality'.
Replying to
Uttermost Part of the Earth (1948) by E. Lucas Bridges archive.org/details/in.ern
The Indians of Tierra del Fuego (1928) by Samuel Lothrop archive.org/details/indian
The important thing to remember is that every set of beliefs held by outgroup members is a 'religion' or 'cult', while the various assumptions and prejudices you and your friends share about the world are just the result of your dispassionate devotion to facts and logic.
People who digitize old public domain books are the real heroes in this world.
You really gotta feel for Eric Weinstein. The guy unified physics or something years ago, and instead of praising him for such an accomplishment people were all like 'Hey, you should write it up so we can check your work', and so he was all like 'fuck you, I'm starting a podcast'
I have a new piece on intersexual conflict and male dominance across human societies, focused particularly on the ways violence and coercion are used by males to control female sexuality and increase their own reproductive success
2 things I think Pinker is incontrovertibly right about: 1) modern nations have significantly lower rates of violent death as % of pop. than most other recorded societies throughout history, 2) poverty n its proxies (ex. mortality) have declined significantly in recent decades. t.co/zbsqqXNLts
This post is unavailable.
The hysterical moralizing about the Aztecs by 21st Euro-Americans is very strange to me. Pretty much the mirror image of how extremely woke people talk about European & American history, but somehow even dumber & more pointless, since it's totally divorced from any real interest.
Twitter is a good illustration of how many people's interest in science, history, etc extends only so far as they can use it as ammunition to trash other people and groups that they don't like.
Happy 4 year anniversary to my blog. The layout may be simple, my output may be slow, the traffic may be poor, & it may not net me any citations or make me any money or anything, but at least it, well...uh...a-at least i-it's there you know, it uh...exists traditionsofconflict.com
I maintain that one of the most important, under-appreciated, and under-theorized cross-cultural patterns is the tendency of men to put on disguises and impersonate nonhuman or metahuman entities
Quote
traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/1/31
Napoleon Chagnon tried to get around Yanomami naming taboos to collect geneologies, and they tricked him in a pretty hilarious fashion traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/8/23
I thought it was a civil discussion but interpret it however you like.
I really like the advertising strategy of repeatedly pandering to the intelligentsia in the middle of a global pandemic with ‘I Fucking Love Science’ style banalities. Why are educated people so susceptible to propaganda? 🤔
Quote
just gonna come out and say it: vulnerable people are always the most susceptible to propaganda, misinformation, and conspiracy, especially in times of cultural anxiety, and if there is a way to help them out of these traps, targeted self-righteous vilification isn’t it
Evo psychologists tend to argue conceptions of beauty do not vary greatly from culture to culture--while this may be true for some aspects/traits, I think the substantial diversity of body modification practices historically & cross-culturally also suggests otherwise in some ways
Darwin - "Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee, and spirituous liquors: they will also, as I have seen, smoke tobacco with pleasure... An American monkey, an Ateles, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus was wiser than many men."
Trying to get teenage boys to hate toxic masculinity by making it sound cool as fuck
Reading Lynn's book and seeing him seriously argue that adult Kalahari hunter-gatherers have an IQ of 54, same as 8 year old European children, really started to elevate my skepticism about a lot of these sorts of comparisons and the cross-cultural validity of some of these tests
Quote
Are there 'race' differences in intelligence? Evidence supposedly comes from 'national IQ' datasets, but when you look at the data...there's a problem:
‘National IQ’ datasets do not provide accurate, unbiased or comparable measures of cognitive ability psyarxiv.com/26vfb/
The guy goes around learning languages, including ones with few speakers left, volunteering at places, learning about people's cultures, talking with them and making them happy, and finally keeping people's home's clean for work. Way more useful to the world than almost anyone.
Quote
Is it rude to say he should’ve contributed more to the world with his life? twitter.com/mjcontrera/sta…
Sexual Selection Through Mate Choice Does Not Explain the Evolution of Art and Music
This is one of those things where even if I was the only person in the world who seriously believed this (I'm not, but even if I was) it would not reduce my confidence one iota that it is correct.
Lynn's eugenics book is fcking nuts-"The ideal for humans would be a contraceptive virus acting for about 10 years that could be given to 12-year-old boys. When they were 22, they could apply for licenses for parenthood. If they failed to obtain these, they could be vasectomized"
In early modern Germany "Executioners, skinners, grave-diggers, shepherds, barber-surgeons, millers, linen-weavers, sow-fielders, latrine-cleaners & bailiffs were among the "dishonorable" by virtue of their trades. This dishonor was...inherited, often through several generations"
Totally appropriate to acknowledge intersex individuals n others who don't fit the mold, but if you fail to recognize the utility of the two sex categories then you'll end up mystified by many cross-cultural universals, such as sexual division of labor, greater male violence, etc
Percentage of men and women justifying intimate partner violence across sub-Saharan Africa. "Women were twice as likely to justify wife beating than men" with greater disparities where polygamy is high, and where GDP, human development and literacy are low bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11
Maybe the argument that '"Objectivity" is just a cover to uphold the status quo' is itself just a cover to uphold the status quo of people generally not striving for objectivity.
'It's okay to have non-conformists on here, we just have to make sure they're small accounts with relatively little influence, but once they start getting bigger we need the leverage that comes with knowing their identity so we can ruin them if they step out of line.'
Quote
Simple idea to make Twitter better...
Anonymous accounts are fine because having non-conformist thought subjects you to the mob.
Once you get 5k followers you can no longer be anonymous. Many journalists are using anonymous accounts as proxies to do their dirty work.
Thoughts?
For all of Game of Thrones pretentions of unflinchingly portraying a dark and ugly world it is kind of jarring how glamorized the brothel scenes tend to be. In the Game of Thrones universe brothels are just where all the fit attractive people go to fuck publicly or something.
This illustrates why, at the end of his career, anthropologist George Murdock said "I feel no hesitation in rejecting the validity and utility of the entire body of anthropological theory, including the bulk of my own work...consigning it to the realm of mythology [not] science"
Found out today that my Dad died. He was the most reliable and secure part of my life, always gave me good advice and perspective and was there when I needed him. He taught me a lot, I’m really gonna miss him
Quote
Really grateful for my relationship with my Dad. Great man who has always been supportive of me, one of the few things that keeps me going.
Comments to this make me want to make this point again.
"A certain pseudo-politics of anthropological interpretation manages to express its solidarity with indigenous peoples by endowing them with the highest Western bourgeois values." - Marshall Sahlins
Quote
“Bregman presents hunter-gatherer societies as being inherently peaceful, antiwar, equal, and feminist likely because these are commonly expressed social values among educated people in his own society today. This is not history but mythology.” traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2020/12/1
Think this is a pretty good candidate for the most misleading paragraph ever written psychologytoday.com/blog/busting-m
I don't think being 'humiliated' hurts him at all, I think every single time his name is mentioned he benefits, positive or negative. When your reputation is already bad & you make money through internet scams what matters is exposure--being humiliated by someone famous is useful t.co/03CvRVXcTs
This post is unavailable.
You see, the information age has accelerated the pace even of nostalgia. Stale memes are rapidly reintroduced into the psychosphere soon after becoming outdated, taking advantage of the glimmer of recognition in the eyes of those whose minds still dream of yesterweek.
Still sometimes think about the Richard Dawkins episode of South Park where the future is made up of competing 'science' worshiping cults killing each other because they can't agree on what's the most 'rational' denomination name for atheists to call themselves. Was pretty sharp.
There is a fine line between trying to understand these sort of practices functionally (which is valuable), and downplaying the extreme violence and suffering they caused, pining any negative reaction to a "colonial gaze". I don't think this thread quite hits the mark. twitter.com/lizzie_wade/st
People often argue some variant of 'the nuclear family is a recent historical invention' but in many hunter-gatherer societies people seem to live primarily in nuclear households.
A consequence of theory of evolution being so widely known & accepted & such a powerful framework for understanding behavior is that the threshold for lots of people to accept some 'evolutionary' explanation for a particular human behavior can often be lower than accuracy demands
"We find that the more that men invest in their children, the more severely people in that culture view infidelity. While men everywhere face risk of losing biological paternity, the relative costs (to men n women) of extra-pair partnerships are greater when investment is higher"
Music appears in all known societies and exhibits striking similarities across them. Cool new pre-print: osf.io/k6tyc/. You can listen to excerpts of songs from all over the world here osf.io/vcybz/
I wrote an article for on the pervasiveness of behaviors and practices across societies that constrain female choice in mating and marriage, and the perceptive work done by anthropologists like Sarah Hrdy and Barbara Smuts to investigate their evolutionary origins.
Quote
On the Nature of Patriarchy | @Evolving_Moloch quillette.com/2018/11/25/on-
Hunter-gatherer disguises exhibit similarities to examples of visual deception found in other species, commonly involving strategies of animal mimicry, masquerade, background matching, or disruptive coloration, and often used to pursue prey or avoid attack link.springer.com/article/10.100
The coolest thing about this is the 'Asaro Mudmen Tribe' and the ghostly masks and body paint and the corresponding origin story about it are an elaborate mythology created by native Asaro Valley villagers in the 1950s to perform for tourists. researchgate.net/publication/38
This post is unavailable.
"“Do you ‘love’ so-and-so?” naming their brother or sister. “Yes!” “Do you ‘love’ so-and-so?” naming their child. “Yes!” “Do you ‘love’ so-and-so?” naming their wife. A stunned silence followed, then peals of laughter. “You don’t ‘love’ your wife, you idiot!”"
I figure part of why the world building in Star Wars was so good in the original films is because George Lucas studied anthropology.
"women created patriarchy" is evolutionary psychology's extreme over-emphasis on mate choice taken to its Galaxy Brain conclusion. It is a fiction that can be maintained only by people who do not read ethnography and have no interest in doing so. See my pinned thread if skeptical
Quote
David Buss suggests that women created patriarchy. "They are not passive pawns of the masculine game". Being the sex that invests more in reproduction, women are more selective, prefer men with status and this reproduces competition and hierarchy. researchgate.net/publication/23
“Across species, individuals are more likely to emerge as leaders if they have a particular morphological, physiological, or behavioral trait increasing their propensity to act first in coordination problems.”
I do kind of wonder how much greater freedom of association also might naturally tend to lead to greater social isolation and loneliness. 'Communal' living (relationships in general really) come with demands and social obligations that many people may not want to be held to.
Quote
If loneliness is a modern epidemic, then its causes are also modern ow.ly/gmLW30lMI2B
Gave the eulogy for my dad at his funeral today, found it very cathartic. My sister really liked it and I think my dad would have too, which were the main things that mattered to me.
New preprint critiquing claims that aspects of human male morphology evolved through selective pressures related to punching. Surveying 32 H-G societies, I find fistfighting uncommon, while wrestling & dueling w/ weapons more salient forms of male conflict ecoevorxiv.org/mbsyf
Apropos of nothing:
There would be no Matrix without Philip K Dick.
Total Recall is an adaptation of a PKD story: came out about a decade before The Matrix.
There's a (far superior) pill scene in that film.
The pill is part of a deception.
Be cautious of strangers offering pills.
