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Comment by groby_b | Hacker News Reader

Except that pretty much no social animal with dominance hierarchy has a ranking function as simple as "status=mates". Most animals track the cost(e.g. more stress, higher metabolic rate) of high status vs the rewards. Which means that in an environment of abundance, the cost often exceeds the rewards.

There's also the phenomenon of reverse hierarchies (essentially, lower ranking members band together to keep anybody from dominating them). Which has at the very least been proposed as an explanation for altruistic behavior in humans, too.

And then there's the point that happiness is not related to status, or access to mates, or even access to resources beyond a certain point.

The world's a bit more complicated than ev. psych suggests.

Edit: No matter if you agree or disagree, Boehm's paper is certainly an interesting read. https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pd...

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I think this paper is one of the most interesting results in this regard:

> Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction

> https://www.jstor.org/stable/41062232

Of course, the relation is not perfect because there are probably more than half a dozen other major things that can go wrong; most prominently disease, relationship and work situation.

I could imagine that dissatisfaction due to disease also largely comes from comparison with others. If everybody is healthier, then more minor diseases have a stronger negative effect on life satisfaction; so not much is gained.

Work satisfaction might have improved, but the hedonic treadmill probably also diminishes the returns in that case.

I could imagine that relationship satisfaction has decreased with the loss of the classical gender roles and culture regulating all of that. E.g. it is known that premarital promiscuity results in decreased marriage satisfaction:

http://nationalmarriageproject.org/wordpress/wp-content/uplo...

> Which means that in an environment of abundance, the cost often exceeds the rewards.

The problem is that environments of abundance basically do not exist, because the population of a species quickly grows to consume any excess. The situation that humans in the developed world face is novel. We are not evolved to deal with abundance because abundance has only ever occurred during the brief gap between when we invented a new technology and when the population has expanded to fill the new, larger ecological niche which that technology enabled.

Uh, yes, they do exist. The example of human cultures that comes to mind are Melanesians which IIRC had relative abundance of natural resources. In the animal kingdom, Bonobos are probably the prime example.

And IIRC, in both cases the reaction to abundance wasn't overpopulation, but the development of a sharing trait. (Because it reduces the cost incurred by unnecessary competition)

In the case of Melanesians, they were at some point taken over by relatively resource-poor Polynesians. (Inequality will cause trouble). Bonobos escaped that problem since they have no competitors in their natural habitat, and they evolved a somewhat interesting mechanism to cope with any of the smaller conflicts that might pop up. (E.g. access to favorite food instead of just normal food). If you're not familiar with it, I recommend reading up on it :)

I would love to read a link about the Melanesians if you have one.

The only way a population doesn't expand to consume available resources is if there is something else which is controlling population growth. For many species, that would be predation. But humans are an apex species, so that's not a factor.

Disease is another possibility. The bubonic plague kept European populations below the malthusian limit for a long time in Europe. But not long enough to really have an effect on our evolved traits. Generally speaking, it's difficult for disease to be a significant problem without agriculture and the population density that it allows. But the consensus is that people who lived in agricultural societies pretty much universally had poor diets (ie, they were living at the Malthusian limit).

The other major factor that would prevent human populations from reaching the Malthusian limit is violence. But violence is usually committed for the purpose of increasing or maintaining status. Either by killing competitors within the tribe or by stealing women and resources from other tribes.

what about lions?

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