Homo Narrativus and the Trouble with Fame

This takes a very sterile mathematical view of society. Everything here is correct, but makes far more sense in the light of evolutionary biology.

Humans are primates which form natural status hierarchies, and will do so in a vacuum absent any forcing function. This makes our behavior far more predictable, and far more deterministic.

Most people assume that humans are a transcendent organism. In truth, we are the only organism that know precisely what we are, but have managed to fool ourselves otherwise. Darwin himself [1] understood the ramifications of evolution on human behavior, and was very conflicted by it.

The only way to truly transcend is to first understand precisely what we are, and our own weaknesses and susceptibilities. Only then can we form societies and habits to prevent our worst behaviors from destroying us.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Descent_of_Man,_and_Selecti...

A similar thing happens in the sports world all of the time. (Largely) random events are shoe-horned into a story about overcoming adversity. The result is then cast as inevitable and the movie rights are eventually sold.

For people who enjoyed this article, I highly recommend Duncan Watts' book "Everything is Obvious" [1]. Its basically the thesis of this article expanded out over the course of a book with a lot of interesting examples and lessons drawn from scholarship (both Watts' own work and many others).

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Obvious-Common-Sense-Fails/...

I think I prefer the term Pans Narrans, from The Science of The Discworld books.

That's interesting.

Maybe we're all just matches, in search of our dry forest.

Binomial nomenclature has a very strict syntax:

- first word is capitalised

- second word is all lowercase

- entire phrase is italicised if possible

Embarrassing for a scientific magazine to get it wrong thrice (once in the title "Homo Narrativus", twice in the text "homo narrativus", "homo probabilisticus"). It should be Homo narrativus.