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Comment by nazgulnarsil | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought the essential internal dichotomy was between maximizing mate selection and maximizing offspring survival. the urge to maximize mate selection carries with it many anti-social behaviors, while the urge to maximize offspring survival requires cooperation with the group. the history of governance has been the history of conflict over how far to the "left" or "right" the social contract should fall. To the left lies collectivism (offspring survival), to the right lies individualism (mate selection).

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You forget about your own survival. You simply will die from hunger if you won't go hunting. Mating and children was always a second priority.

The most essential dichotomy is between leisure and running for your life, I think.

wrong. the only reason to survive is to mate and ensure offspring survival. if personal survival was maximized by evolution why don't we all live to be 900?

Not to contradict your point, but I think there are other reasons we don't live to be 900. A human with a 900-year lifespan would be able to reproduce many more times than a human with a 90-year lifespan, so if a 900-year lifespan were easy to evolve then we would have done it by now.

Good question. The only answer I can think of is to discourage competition with your own offspring.

I think there is probably some range of possible lifespans given our architecture. It just so happened that longer ones weren't increasing reproductive fitness (probably for several interrelated reasons) so it was never selected for.

So that explains why conservatives have higher birth rates, live in low crime areas, oppose abortion and favor traditional family structures! Wait...

don't make me laugh. you really want to try to map the modern political parties onto the traditional left right political spectrum? forget it, both sides are far to the left.

Psst, he was being sarcastic.

Yeah, he was trying to invalidate my point by sarcastically saying that conservatives don't map well onto the traditional right of the political spectrum. He's right, but not for the reason he thinks.

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