Footnote Physicist

by Steven Gussman  Four complementary bases for altruism have been proposed in the biological sciences: kin selection ( nepotism ), 1   reciprocal altruism ( friendship through trade ), 2  sexual signaling (altruism that is attractive to onlooking prospective mates), 3  and manipulation (one individual coercing resources from another). 4 Reciprocal altruism is a selection pressure which entails that a reciprocally altruistic trait (where the altruist and recipient ‘take turns’ in each role) can evolve as long as it leaves both parties better off than if they had not undergone the trade (meaning that for reciprocity to evolve, free riders need to be excluded ). 5 The governing inequality can be seen in figure 1: 6     (1/p²)(Σb altruist, k – Σc altruist, j ) > (1/q²)Σb cheater, m That is that summing over repeated encounters, and taking into account the frequency of the altruistic allele p, and the frequency of the cheater allele q, the diff...

 by Steven Gussman I never met Dr. Trivers. As such, I feel a bit silly writing a scientific obituary for him. I do not want to take any attention away from his actual family, friends, and colleagues, whose obituaries I am looking forward to reading. But Dr. Trivers did touch my life. Like many others, I first learned about Dr. Trivers and his ideas from Richard Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene 1  and Steven Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate . 2   For me, these were the heady days of 2018. I had just graduated from college a year before, and taught a semester as a PTL (before getting kicked out for political reasons). I was on a crash course learning about postmodernsim, The Long March Through The Institutions, and how so much of social “science” was hostile to evolutionary biology. Pinker showed how Trivers’ ideas brought the social down to a hard science, like physics, by revealing the underlying evolutionary logic that explains how and why such behavioral traits ev...

          “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.”           – Carl Sagan I           Articulated reason is the use of conscious thought processes to think things through, rationally.  Thinkers such as Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues argue that to a first approximation, the human brain has two systems of thought.   System-one are our base instincts, intuitions, biases, and knee-jerk responses.  These aren't all bad and do form a foundation for articulated reason to work from—evolution by natural selection selected system-one so as to help us survive and reproduce, which often meant getting things right in a particular context, that which our ancestors faced in their pre-historic environment (the flip side is that much of reality was unimportant to our ancestors' genes, and somet...