Quotes from "The Social Leap"

These are the lines from William von Hippel in his book “The Social Leap” that I found to be incisive and insightful.

“The ability to kill at a distance is the single most important invention in the history of warfare, because weaker individuals can attack stronger individuals from a position of superior numbers and relative safety.”

“As if division of labor were not enough, Homo erectus then sealed the deal with the single most important innovation in human history: the control of fire.”

“Long before the invention of writing (which is only about five thousand years old), human culture had become cumulative by virtue of our oral storytelling traditions.”

“When we weigh up the costs and benefits, we see that farming afforded our ancestors some assurances against starvation, but at the cost of various new illnesses, reduced stature and longevity, excruciating halitosis, and often a far longer working day. The end result was that early farmers worked harder to achieve a worse life than their ancestors had.”

“… the safest strategy when dealing with unknown strangers is politeness, and indeed cultures that have high levels of violence often have high levels of politeness.”

“As a result of this biologically mandated difference in parental investment, for every unit of energy that a human male must donate to produce a child, human females must donate much more than a million times as many… women have more skin in the game, with the result that men tend to compete for women and women tend to be much choosier than men.”

“… good performance on the part of a friend was more threatening than good performance on the part of a stranger. It’s an ugly truth about people, but these results show that we undermine our friends when there is a risk they’ll outperform us in important domains.”

“Of all the preferences that evolution gave us, I suspect the desire to share the contents of our minds played the single most important role in elevating us to the top of the food chain.”

“Nothing is more important to us than our social connections because nothing was more critical for our ancestors’ survival and reproduction.”

“Toddlers endlessly narrate the world, pointing out people and objects simply to establish joint attention. No other animal does this at any stage of development.”

“… self-control plays an important role in social functioning, but… social demands are probably what led to the evolution of self-control in the first place.”

“Once we translate our problems into abstractions, our temptations don’t swamp our control functions.”

“Robert Trivers... suggested that we deceive ourselves in order to deceive others more effectively.”

“… paradox: technical innovation is the defining feature of our species, but most people never invent anything.”

“If division of labor is our most important social innovation, and money comes in second place, what’s next? My choice for third place might sound odd, but I’d be inclined to put waiting in line next.”

“… one of the most substantial and widely replicated sex differences in preferences is the tendency for men to be more interested in objects and women to be more interested in people.”

“The irony is that Homo sapiens rose to worldwide dominance due to our hypersociality, but it may be the relatively asocial ones among us whom we have to thank for the technical inventions that so differentiate our lives from those of all the other beasts on this planet.”  

“… the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to more settled horticulturalist practices was a critical point in the move away from egalitarianism and toward despotism in many human societies.”

“… people are largely incapable of distinguishing between overconfidence and high levels of well-calibrated confidence. As a consequence, people with unrealistically grand self-concepts have an advantage in leadership competitions.”

“… 20 to 40 percent of human children* also die by age five. If we consider twenty years old to be the beginning of adulthood in humans, we see that 25 to 50 percent of humans across these societies* never reach adulthood.” (*human foragers)

“Our tribalism is actually cause and consequence of our cooperative nature, as our capacity to care for members of our own group evolved to make us more effective killers.”

“Sexual selection creates the most important challenge to within-group cooperation, as everyone is motivated to increase their status relative to other members of their group.”

“We marvel at the audacity of our ancestors who struck off into the unknown, but a fair portion of human expansion and exploration reflects desperation rather than bravery. As often as not, exploration meant that our ancestors were escaping, or being forced to abandon preferred areas by their stronger or more aggressive neighbors.”

“Due to the importance of relative fairness, humans have evolved a hypersensitivity to the possibility of being cheated. This sensitivity can be seen in… an enhanced capacity to solve problems when they are phrased in terms of detecting cheaters…”

“… hypocrisy is fundamental to human nature, and like self-deception more generally, it evolved to help us persuade others that even when our actions aren’t exemplary, our hearts are in the right place.”

“… our immune system evolved to hum along at peak capacity when we’re happy but to slow down dramatically when we’re not. This is why long-term unhappiness can literally kill you through its immune-suppressing effects, and why loneliness in late adulthood is deadlier than smoking. Indeed, once you’re over sixty-five, you’re better off smoking, drinking, or overeating with your friends than you are sitting at home alone.”

“… our ancestors were more likely to survive childhood and mothers were more likely to have children in rapid succession if they had the help of a grandmother. How did evolution create grandmothers? By preventing women from producing more children of their own while they still had plenty of life in them, evolution gave them the opportunity to focus on their grandchildren rather than their children. This is why human females evolved menopause.”

“Often referred to as testosterone poisoning or just male stupidity, the biggest demographic risk factor in most industrialized societies is the combination of being young and male… What many people don’t realize is that male stupidity is actually an adaptation to female choosiness, as male risk taking and conflict seeking are products of sexual selection… Male stupidity is further enhanced by the fact that risk taking itself is an honest signal of male quality.”

“… there were many more females than males in your ancestry. At first glance this imbalance seems impossible, as it takes two to tango. But, of course, some men have lots of partners and father many children; other men not so much. Men are far more likely than women to have a very large number of children, and also far more likely to get left out of the mating game altogether.”

“there is no way we can rely on inborn knowledge or instinct to survive... learning is tightly linked to our motivational system... Curiosity is one of our fundamental drives, and the satisfaction associated with learning and mastering something new is universal.”

“there are two important forms of learning (and therefore two important sources of life satisfaction) that people often fail to recognize: play and storytelling.”