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Comment by goodJobWalrus | Hacker News Reader

> That's very literally survivor bias. How many kids swam unsupervised, jumped off rocks and rode down steep hills and didn't return home?

According to this guy, very few:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201404/ri...

> From an evolutionary perspective, the obvious question about risky play is this: Why does it exist? It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death, so why hasn’t natural selection weeded it out? The fact that it hasn’t been weeded out is evidence that the benefits must outweigh the risks. What are the benefits? Laboratory studies with animals give us some clues.

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While I don't disagree with his premise, that gives almost no data, and seems like a weak argument. Why hasn't war been weeded out? It must not really be all that risky.

That's not the correct way to look at it. Those who won wars ended up more prosperous (up until very very recently) and where able to reproduce more.

Societal behaviour like war differs from individual behaviour like 'risky play'. War, as a societal behaviour, emerges from the individual behaviour of fighting others for resources in a world of scarcity. That was a beneficial behaviour in many situations, as it prevented starvation. It would take much longer than our time within complex society has allowed to weed this behaviour out of our DNA on account of emergent behaviour.

Have you read the whole article? He goes on to describe research on rats who are prevented from playing as pups and develops his argument from there.

All an evolutionary argument tells us is that the benefits outweighed the risks in the ancestral environment.

For that to make sense you'd have to have credible evidence that evolution moves at a glacial pace. It doesn't.

It responds very quickly to a changing environment.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201501280875.html

It's very silly to draw such a broad conclusion about evolution in general from a single adaptation (most likely involving a single mutation) by a single species.

I was referring to this part of his argument:

>It can cause injury (though serious injury is rare) and even (very rarely) death

keywords: "rare" and "very rarely", although it would be better argument to look at statistics on accidental deaths during risky play, now and in years past if I had time.

The ancestral environment was way more dangerous though

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