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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
55:57
The Truth About Gene Wars: r/K Selection Theory [P1]
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Inn Radio.
So I was long promised that this is part one of a three-part presentation entitled Gene Wars.
This is R vs. K selection.
So this is going to blow your mind, guaranteed.
This is A way of looking at and understanding the world, civilization, nature, culture, war, peace, fertility from a biological, hormonal, epigenetic, and genetic perspective that explains society in such a way that once you get it, once you really understand it, You will never be able to look at the world in the same way again.
I believe you will be able to look at it very, very clearly.
So, just before we begin, just something important to know about genetics.
So, of course you're composed of DNA, and each one of these genetic components wishes to reproduce itself.
And I have An eyebrow?
In fact, I have two eyebrows, and if I don't shave, I have one.
And my eyebrow, what is its job?
Well, its job is to keep the sweat from running into my eyes.
And why does the eyebrow do it?
Is it kind?
Does it care about me?
No!
Selfish little caterpillar on my forehead.
No, it doesn't do any of that.
Why does it want to help keep Sweat out of my eyes.
Well, the deal with the eyebrow is... Okay, fine, Steph!
I'll help you keep the sweat out of your eyes, but...
What you do in return is use your better vision to hunt, eat, have sex, so that I can use you to make a new eyebrow.
This is the really important perspective.
You've got a little toe.
What is your little toe for?
Well, it gives you a little bit of extra balance and helps you do the Macarena in a pretty seductive manner.
And why does it do that?
Out of the goodness of its heart?
Out of the altruistic generosity of its welfare state-driven benevolence?
No!
It does it.
So, okay, Steph, I will attach itself to this smelly extremity of yours so that I'll give you a little bit of extra balance.
You use that for hunting and for seducing the ladies so that you can have sex and I can use you to make another toe.
This is really, really foundational.
It's kind of a weird perspective.
But it's really important to understand that we are just this big, giant, inconvenient machine for all of our body parts to make new body parts.
The liver wants to make a new liver, the eyeball wants to make a new eyeball, and it will help us to the degree with which we can serve that end of making new stuff.
That's the very, very important thing to understand before we dive in, having said that.
All right.
So for decades, there are two main reproductive strategies that have been recognized by biologists.
They're included in the most respected of textbooks, and they've been taught in most, if not all, major biological courses and programs in university and so on.
And it's been around for a long time.
It's survived challenges pretty well.
And these reproductive strategies are referred to as R slash K.
Selection theory.
You can use the mnemonic rabbit for R, and you'll see why as we go forward.
The R strategy is an adaptation to excessive resources, right?
So when you're not going to run out of food, then you want to have as many offspring as humanly possible.
You're not going to starve to death, right?
So think of rabbits in a field.
They're not going to run out of grass or whatever, right?
The R-strategy for reproduction emphasizes quantity over quality.
So think of like a frog has like 12 billion eggs and then tadpoles and then, right?
But they don't give a crap about any of them.
In fact, they'll eat them if they get hungry.
And so they don't invest in their kids, they just have massive numbers of kids, and you know, each kid crosses their fingers, and of course maybe 2 or 3% of them make it to adulthood.
It's the same thing with the sea turtles, right?
They go up and they dump their eggs in the beach, and then cross your fingers, dodge the seagull alley, and try and get back to the water, and 95 or 97 or 98% of you will never make it to adulthood.
So, you could also call it my first-person shooter strategy, spray and pray.
Just cloud of semen, cross your fingers, keep moving.
And it tends to be centralized around prey species, so rabbits, mice, deer, insects, small lizards, and so on.
And that's where it tends to occur.
Now, the K strategy is very different.
Now the K strategy is an adaptation to scarce resources.
So when resources are scarce, you've got to really work to try and gather them, to hunt them, to store them, to catch them.
And it emphasizes, in terms of offspring, quality.
Over quantity.
You have fewer kids, but you invest much more in those kids.
You teach them how to hunt, you nurture them, you raise them, and it's pair-bonded and so on.
Now, the K species tend to be larger, more complex, bigger brains, and they tend to be predator species.
So lions, wolves, the larger kinds of owls, which are more K-selected than the smaller owls and so on.
We'll go into these in more detail and I'll explain at the end how this connects to politics.
Let's look at the R-strategy.
There are five main traits that are generally talked about.
There's an aversion to competition in R-strategy organisms.
Why compete?
Because resources are everywhere.
There's grass everywhere.
Why are you going to compete over this or that patch of grass?
No, you just move on.
So there's an aversion to competition, rampant, rampant promiscuity, and that's because it's quantity over quality in terms of offspring.
Low investment, single parenting.
You don't spend a lot of time raising up your kids to live right and hunt good.
You just dump them in the wilds and see what happens.
Early sexual maturity and activity.
And one of the things that's very true in biology as a whole is that the earlier an organism matures, the quicker it matures, the less complex it ends up being.
So, you know, think of like a horse can walk within a day or two of being Born, kids stay like 10, 11, 12 months.
But, you know, we end up with all this sophistication.
The brain takes like 20 to 25 years to mature.
Still waiting!
But other brains, the brain of a millipede is like born good to go.
So, the longer things take to develop, the higher quality, complexity, and sophistication there tends to be.
So, I mean, the R strategy, like think of insects and so on, early sexual maturity activity Low loyalty to the in group among our strategies.
You're going to get eaten, maybe, and you don't want to go, oh, my friend's getting eaten by the fox, says the bunny, and he rushes over to help.
Right?
I mean, now you are down one more bunny, so it's two for one.
So you don't want a lot of loyalty to your in-group, because you're not in competition, you're not teaming up to hunt stuff, and if you're Your friend, or your brother, your sister, or whatever, your father, your mother, are being hunted by a fox, or whatever, then you just...
Just try and get away.
That makes sense, right?
Now, the K strategy, there's an embrace of competition.
There is a win-lose.
There is a real desire to show yourself as better.
There is delayed and monogamous sexuality.
You want to monopolize the high-quality mates for yourself.
Because you invest so much in parenting, you really care Whether the kids you're parenting are yours or not.
So you want to try and hold on to your pair-bonded partner so that she's not having sex with someone else or he's not having sex.
Well, I guess the woman always knows the kids are hers.
So delayed and monogamous sexuality is key.
High investment dual parenting, right?
These are the animals that stay together and invest a lot into their kids.
Late sexual maturity and activity.
That is, of course, to Give the chance to display reproductive fitness before having your kids.
And high in-group loyalty.
These are the pack animals.
These are the wolves.
They care about each other.
They will work to defend each other.
They compete with each other sometimes.
But high in-group loyalty.
These are the pack animals who work together, who team together in order to hunt their prey.
Now, here's some If an animal species lives under conditions where resources are ample, so that there are good opportunities for expansion, but where there are also considerable dangers, such as predators, then it will be advantageous for this species to use most of its resources on breeding as fast as possible and spending few resources on each offspring.
This is called r-selection.
The r is the mathematical symbol for the rate of reproduction.
R-selection causes the evolution of small animals growing fast and breeding fast.
Examples are mice and insects.
The opposite of R-selection is K-selection.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle K. This is what happens when a species lives under conditions where the population is limited by scarce resources rather than by predators.
The capital K is a mathematical symbol for carrying capacity, i.e.
the maximum number of individuals that the resources in a given habitat can continually sustain.
Case selection leads to the evolution of big animals, which breed slowly and utilize the given resources optimally, and which invest a considerable proportion of their resources in the care of their sparse offspring.
If the animals under these conditions bred excessively, then they would have insufficient resources for nurturing each young, and they might overexploit their habitat to the point where the resources were exhausted.
K-selection is found in those animals that come last in a food chain, such as whales, elephants, and humans.
So, if lion breeds too much, A pack of lions or a pride of lions, sorry.
If they breed too much, then they eat all of the food in the vicinity and they all starve to death, right?
And this balance is really, really important to understand.
You watch those nature documentaries where, you know, the wolf is in hot pursuit of the baby deer and everyone's like, run deer, run!
But of course, if all of the prey get away, if all the deer can outrun the wolves, Then the wolves all die of starvation and then the deer breed without opposition until they strip all of the resources from the environment and then the deer all starve to death.
And so the fact that some deer get caught is essential for the long-term sustainability of the deer population.
So, let's look at these, um, the rabbits, right?
Breed like rabbits is the old thing, right?
So, you know, you've got rabbits, rabbits, rabbits.
They're never going to run out of grass, pretty much.
And so you get all these rabbits.
Breed, breed, breed, breed, breed.
And that's what they're up to.
And they're basically just incredibly rapid photocopy machines designed to turn grass into rabbits as quickly as humanly possible.
Because, you know, grass is easy to obtain, according to some of my listeners, and so you don't have to chase it, you don't have to hunt it, you just go and eat it.
Now wolves, on the other hand, aha!
Right?
There's a bunny!
And so the wolf is going to have, like, two kids, and is going to teach them how to hunt rabbits, because the rabbit is going to be vamoosing on a regular basis, according to Looney Tunes, and so you really have to have a lot of skill and cooperation and so on.
Like you can see how jackals hunt gazelle, right?
Like some of them wait, the others herd the gazelle towards the ones who wait, they jump out.
This requires a degree of teamwork, cooperation, pack mentality, intellectual sophistication, or at least intelligent sophistication in order to achieve it, whereas the gazelle just chewing away on the leaves and so on.
Not that complicated a situation.
All right.
So, looking at this in a tiny bit of detail.
A meadow has enough food for 100 rabbits.
Wolves keep the rabbit population.
at, let's say, around 30.
Now, the rabbits are regularly killed by the wolves and they can't do anything to protect themselves against a wolf attack.
There's no, like, Monty Python Vorpal Bunny straight for the throat Brea rabbit, and none of that, right?
So, any rabbit who waits to breed risks being eaten and therefore is the end of that particular genetic pattern.
So, natural selection favors breeding early and often.
Competition between the rabbits serves no purpose.
The limiting factor for the rabbits are the wolves.
Not any lack of food, right?
I mean, they're never gonna...
End up running out of grass because they're going to be eaten by wolves before that.
The rabbits don't compete with the wolves.
They're not going to attack each other or any of that.
So there's no competition, purpose, or value for them.
If the rabbit is eating food you want, just, you know, step over here, right?
Like that Seinfeld joke about guys in weddings, they all look the same, you know.
In case the groom doesn't show up, you can say, do you take this guy?
Everyone just takes a step over, right?
Since competition and defense are useless, low investment parenting is optimal.
I mean, basically, the commandments, here are the two commandments of rabbit parents.
Number one, if it is green, eat it.
Number two, if it's big and moving, run!
That's really all they are down for.
So, low investment parenting is optimal.
Rabbits or our selected species are designed to convert resources into babies as quickly and as often as possible.
So the males abandon the females in favor.
of promiscuity.
I mean, you've got, there's no point sitting around and trying to train your kids to do what?
Run from wolves and eat grass?
It's not that complicated.
And so they abandoned females in favor of promiscuity.
And there's no value to a pack mentality.
In fact, there's a genetic disincentive for a pack mentality because you can't fight a wolf.
So if a friend of yours gets eaten, you just keep running.
There's no in-group loyalty and there's no A pack mentality, not only is there a negative, but you don't need to get together to hunt your leaves or grass or whatever, so it doesn't really matter.
So, what are the pressures that produce our selection?
Well, an early death, right?
The earlier the death, the more you want to hyper-accelerate your development, have sex early, quickly, often, all that kind of stuff.
But enough about my teenagers.
Also, if the environment is random.
In other words, you don't know where the fox is or the wolf is.
They come out and grab you, and the more random the environment, the more you're going to have R-selection pressures.
Lowered population density, of course, relative to the resources.
In other words, if the meadow can sustain 100 rabbits, but the wolves keep the population of the rabbits at 30, then that's an R-selection pressure.
Absence of competitive pressures.
is also important.
And these produce animals like rabbits.
They're docile.
They flee from danger.
They mate promiscuously.
They're single moms.
There's no sexual restriction and no in-group preferences.
Compare this to wolves.
We'll get to Kay in a sec.
But compare this to wolves.
Wolves are highly sexually selective.
They only want the best.
They're monogamous.
They invest heavily in their cubs.
They oppose early mating and compete in packs and of course invest heavily in their offspring.
So the K selection pressures are basically this.
Prey is far more rare than plants, right?
Easy for rabbits to find food, hard for foxes and wolves to find food.
It's on the move, it runs, it burrows, and so on.
So as we mentioned, excessive breeding in lions brings starvation, so competition selection defines reproduction capacity.
It's quality over quantity.
Because hunting is vastly more complex than grazing, skills are of little benefit to prey, but they do serve predators.
So if you are, you know, man-whore, pickup artist, wolf guy, you're a promiscuous, low-investment wolf, you're out-competed, because you have a whole bunch of kids, you don't stick around to teach them anything, and the kids who are trained by their parents, few kids who are trained by their parents on how to effectively hunt, they're going to out-compete The wolves who don't know their house from a hole in the ground.
Monogamy, you want to monopolize your high value mates, combines of course with high investment parenting.
You're only going to invest in kids that you know are yours, so monogamy is the way to go.
And potential mating partners must prove worth.
How well can you hunt?
How well can you kill?
How well, how much food can you bring me while I'm pregnant and possibly disabled?
So sexuality is delayed to allow for the assessment of the fitness of a potential mate.
K-selection produces packs of animals with strong in-group loyalties.
Our selected prey exhibit little to no sadness when one of their group is killed.
I've seen this myself.
I mean, a rabbit gets grabbed by something and the other rabbits are like, meh, more for me, right?
They're not exactly hallmark cards.
Now, K-selected animals are generally larger and more complex because our selection is inherently dysgenic.
It means it is not built on complexity and complexity.
Because it's quantity over quality.
Well, you know, just think of, you know, mass-produced Ladas, you know, versus, you know, handcrafted Ferraris or whatever.
It is inherently dysgenic.
It resists progress, which is why a lot of the real R-selected stuff, like down at the bottom of the food chain, you know, like the phyloplankton and the insects and so on, not a lot of evolution going on there.
Now, this is, getting to the real meat of the matter, which is us, you, me, and K.
This is special K.
So strategies can change in terms of evolution and choices that can be made by a species.
So One of the big things that happened to us was we lost our fur.
Some could be argued more than others, but we lost our fur and this allowed us in the hot parts of the world to hunt animals.
Basically, human beings are like running machines.
You just run and run and run.
You can outlast a good number of the animals.
And that's partly because we have no fur and so when we run, the breeze cools us down, right?
And so we can just basically run after an antelope until it collapses from heat exhaustion in 10 or 15 minutes.
And so losing the fur gave us a huge advantage when it came to hunting.
Also, when we went from sort of all fours to upright, It allowed for considerable brain growth, because when you're on all fours, your whole back and your ass is exposed to the sun.
But when you walk upright, you present a narrower window for the sun to land on.
And so you don't need to use as much of your body's water and energy for cooling, right?
Because you just don't get as hot.
So more water and energy is available for the brain, and the brain is our most expensive organ by far.
And so These are things that change.
Now, of course, when we lost our fur, we could hunt better, we get smarter, we use more tools, then we become kings of the jungle, and we can get as much food as we want, so we are in a situation of low predation, at least from within the tribe, and high resource availability.
So, bingo, bango, bongo, that gives you mass orgy, Samoan-style sex.
And so you've got an R strategy for human beings.
Babies, babies, babies, babies, babies.
And then you start running out of resources, right?
Because you hit up at the top of the carrying capacity of the environment.
You run out of antelopes.
You run out of stuff to hunt.
So now there's more conflict and humans start to prey upon each other, right?
There's more conflict among human beings.
So the R, right?
Hey, we're great hunters.
We've got tons of food.
Uh-oh, we've got tons of people.
We're running out of food.
We turn on each other.
And so R then gives way to K selection and the R's, some of the R's flee.
They're like, oh man, I don't do the fighting thing.
I'm a ghost man.
I'm gone, baby.
Over time, this strategy evolves, right?
RUR, RUK, well it's better if you can do it real time than waiting for intergenerational changes, so it evolves from genetics to epigenetics, which is the activation or deactivation of particular genes based upon environmental cues.
We'll get to more of that in a few minutes.
So, the R-tribes They flee.
I don't want to fight!
I don't want to fight!
I'm a lover, not a fighter.
So they vanish.
They go.
And they flee to resource-scarce environments where nobody wants to go.
So you leave the lush jungles and all of that where there's tons of food, and you head north.
And then you end up in godforsaken places like, I don't know, which listeners do I want to offend most?
The Outer Hebrides!
I actually spent a week camping there as a child.
Not the most human-friendly part of the planet.
So you get pushed into resource-scarce environments.
And so you flee as R, but then, because you're in a resource-scarce environment, K begins to kick in.
So you go to Europe, you go to England, you go to Ireland, Scotland, you go to the Nordic countries, you go to Siberia, right?
Massive sections of humanity ended up in Siberia, for which I'm sure the entire planet would like to apologize.
And now you have a challenge.
It's not tribal competition that makes your resources scarce.
It's that big-ass European winter that is a challenge.
So you end up, as the are-people-who-fled, you end up raising crops and animals.
But that requires a huge amount of investment in your children to make them good farmers, to make them good livestock managers, to make them hoe the back forty and repair the fences and plan and not eat their seed crop during the winter.
If you eat your seed crop, you're basically eating tree bark and offspring come spring.
Now, when you start raising crops and animals, you end up with a big division of labor.
Because, you know, I'm the barley guy, the guy down the street is the wheat guy, and then there's a guy who does milk, and then there's a guy who has pigs, and we all have to trade with each other.
Because, you know, a steady diet of wheat gets a little old after a while.
Unless, of course, in the form of beer.
But, so you get cooperative assertiveness, you get trade, win-win negotiations, and the way that you enforce social rules in this kind of environment is not through violence, but through ostracism, through social enforcement, right?
Because social enforcement condemns ostracized individuals to genetic death rather than, you know, fighty, beheading death, right?
Because if you ostracize males, for instance, disruptive males, if you ostracize them from The eggs from the women, then they don't get to reproduce, and so you go with gene death, which is why people are so terrified of ostracism.
Ostracism hits the same brain centers and causes the same pain as physical torture.
We don't want to be ostracized because it's gene death for us.
And so these kinds of societies, you know, you think Calvinistic or rigid or whatever, but they require a lot of cooperation.
They deal with very strict social rules, a lot of ostracism, threats of ostracism going on, and so on.
Crops and livestock require the deferral of gratification.
Intense planning, cooperation, docility, and the conservation of energy, which have a lot to do with the R selection, become a liability.
I don't feel like fixing the fence.
Oh, my sheep all escaped, right?
So you flee as a prey species.
You flee as an R. Man, I don't want to have a fight over the lost antelope.
But you end up returning as a hyper-predator species, so to speak.
So you flee as an R, you come back as Super K, which is kind of the story of colonialism in some ways.
So, a couple of quotes.
R vs. K selection.
The choice between the two strategies depends on early experience.
People raised in a stressful environment exhibit typical R traits.
So we're talking about how human beings dynamically adapt to environmental cues to figure out whether it's better to go R or to go K. Kind of tough to go both ways, right?
So people raised in a stressful environment exhibit typical R traits such as many and early sexual contacts, large families, risk-taking, and short life expectancy.
In a safe, predictable environment, they will typically have lower fertility and higher life expectancy, and invest in long-term benefits such as education.
Socioeconomic development with its accompanying demographic transition and drive to maximize quality of life can be viewed as a shift from an R to a K strategy by humanity.
Now even within a species, there is a margin of variation within the RK continuum.
For example, researchers discovered two varieties of the same opossum species, one living on the continent where they are threatened by predators, one on an island where their life is more safe.
It turned out that even in captivity, the island variety lived longer and had fewer offspring.
Followed more of a K strategy than its mainland cousin, right?
So here, same species.
One is adapting to an environment with predators.
And when you have random predation, breeding early and often is the key.
Same species.
One with predators turns R. One with no predators turns K. Even within captivity, over time, it has become genetic.
And that's important.
That happens to human beings as well, as we'll continue to talk about.
Here's a summary table.
I'll go through it quickly and you can of course pause this and get into more details if you want.
Our organisms, short lifespan, small, weak and vulnerable, fast maturation, they're prone to taking risks, opportunistic exploiters, The resource is available.
They'll eat it.
Less intelligent and experienced.
They have a very strong sex drive.
Reproduce at an early age.
Large number of offspring.
Small relative size at birth.
Little care for offspring.
Variable population size, right?
Depending on the resources, the population grows and shrinks.
Many years ago in Australia, the Australian farmers got rid of the dingoes and other predators on the rabbits.
The rabbits bred like rabbits and ended up stripping the outback bear and all starving to death and it was a big mess.
They have a long lifespan.
They tend to be large organisms.
They're robust and well-protected.
They're slow to mature.
They are risk adverse.
Risk adverse.
They are consistent exploiters.
They are more intelligent in experience.
They have a relatively weak sex drive.
They reproduce at a later age.
They have a small number of offspring who have a large relative size at birth.
They put a lot of care into their offspring and they generally have a stable population size.
Like human beings, I mean, it's a gruesome fact that, you know, our brains are so huge.
And if you look at babies, they have these like weird Ally McBeal style dancing baby giant heads.
And basically human beings exit the mother's womb about 12 minutes before their heads get too big and they would just split their moms in two like wishbones at a Thanksgiving turkey dinner.
And that's why babies are born so helpless.
Like they've got to get out because any bigger the hips won't take it.
And that's why babies are so helpless.
And it's why the first year of life sometimes called the fourth trimester or the first couple of months because they really should still be in the womb.
They're so helpless, but they can't stay in there any longer.
So epigenetics is really, really important here.
RNK strategies do not need to be fixed in the genes.
They don't have to be pure in nature.
They can be epigenetically shaped by early experience.
We're going to talk in part two of this series about the genetic roots and genetic manifestations of R versus K strategies, which is hugely important to understand.
The third part, which is the gene wars called ideology, which is R versus K strategies attempting to create societies in which they dominate.
Anyway, we'll get to that in a sec.
Well, not in a sec, but in a bit.
Environments can change in carrying capacity and risk slash unpredictability over the generations.
So organisms can adapt strategies to the current situation, especially humans.
We're incredibly adaptive.
We have genetics, we have epigenetics, we have neuroplasticity, which is the capacity of the brain to reprogram itself based on new information, which I'm trying to do to you.
So epigenetic biological effects may be and seem to be mediated by hormones.
Now, hormonal levels are dependent upon experience, upon the environment.
So, as we've mentioned, our strategies for reproduction are the most appropriate in a dangerous, uncontrollable environment where there's little guarantee of surviving into adulthood.
Such an environment is stressful!
And when all the way from the mother's stress to the fetus in the womb, when the When mothers are stressed, the fetus is stressed, when the baby is stressed, and so on, it leads to the release of glucocorticoid hormones such as cortisol.
Children who are subjected to chronically high levels of these stress hormones are driven, are programmed to develop into our strategist reproducers and lifeforms, focusing on quick reproduction rather than long-term maturation.
So, achieved by higher levels of sex hormones, of course, testosterone in men, estrogen in women.
This leads to early sexual maturity, a strong sex drive, a tendency towards aggressivity and risk-taking in men, and high fertility in women.
On the negative side, of course, these are the high RPMs that burn out the motor.
High levels of sex hormones are associated with a higher probability of heart disease and cancer, and thus a shorter life expectancy.
Let's look at how this manifests.
In one instance, the primary cause of childhood stress is an insecure attachment to the mother, not knowing if your mother is there for you, not feeling that she's reliable, not feeling her behavior is predictable.
And the offspring experience It's two sides of the same coin, in a way.
So there's a lack of support.
Also, if the mother is excessively fearful, if the mother does not want the child to explore the world on his or her own, and thus develop autonomy, well... So this motherly neglect and over-concern is stressful in itself, but it also signals a dangerous external environment.
Don't go out of the yard.
Be careful on those stairs.
Everything's dangerous.
Worry, worry, worry.
This helicopter stuff that's been going on in parenting for the last, I don't know, a couple of decades, maybe?
I mean, when I was a kid, it was... Here's a hunting bow.
Good luck for the weekend.
But whatever signals a dangerous or random external environment provokes R-style epigenetic and hormonal adaptations in children, you can go to bombinthebrain.com for more of my presentations on that information.
Now, of course, if you don't get a lot of attention from your mother, that signals to your body that she probably has a whole bunch of other offspring to care for, and when there's a lot of offsprings, that's a sign of an R-type situation.
Also, and we'll talk about this more a little later, if the father is absent, if there's no father in the household, bang!
You have instant R-karma.
Because, of course, that signals that the father is gone, which means there's an R-type reproductive strategy, which is why girls raised without a father, sexually mature earlier, have earlier and unprotected sex.
They're just doing what Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has laid down.
Less immediate causes of childhood stress may include sexual, physical or emotional abuse, malnutrition, diseases, living in true poverty, in a ghetto or war zone.
All of these can be seen as signals for the hormonal system to prepare the body and brain to invest their energy in short-term reproduction, neglecting long-term goals.
It's almost like they're two different species.
And, of course, we're all humans, but this R versus K, almost like two different species, because incomprehensible to each other.
You look at people... There was a famous song... Actually, I once peed next to Lawrence Gowen.
Gowen did a song called... About criminals.
How he said he got this song because some guy was like, ah, you know, I'm a really smart criminal.
I'm doing really well.
And he just kept ending up in jail and not learning anything.
It's incomprehensible to the case strategists.
What the hell are people doing?
And at the same time, they are strategists.
You know, in their hippie, doofus, reefer madness kind of way, look at the K strategists like, square man, they don't have no any fun, no spontaneity, you know, why would you want to get up in the morning if you knew exactly how your day was going to go?
I couldn't work in a cubicle, man.
Like all this Jack Kerouac stuff, right?
Incomprehensible and, we'll talk a little bit at the end, the degree of incompatibility between R and K selected people, not insignificant.
High levels of stress hormones stunt the development of various tissues in the body, in particular the hippocampus region in the brain.
That is the part that manages the consolidation of memories and the build-up of experience, the capacity to predict The consequences of current behavior to see over the horizon to the future.
Again, there are strategists who fled to resource-scarce environments who then had to learn how to defer gratification and so on.
Anyone who's like hungry, eat seed crop, well, they don't tend to last very long.
And also, of course, if you're growing your own food, you have a fixed ceiling of how much you can eat.
You have too many kids, well, you have a problem.
I'm not saying all our strategists are criminals, but I'm pretty sure that most criminals are our strategists.
So people who are raised in stressful environments have a lower life expectancy, generally tend to be shorter, and interestingly, they're more likely to become obese when they have excess food.
Right?
Because the limitation is predation, not a lack of food.
So just eat, eat, eat, eat, eat.
And to reproduce, reproduce, reproduce.
Reproduction takes a lot of energy.
Having sex, being pregnant, breastfeeding takes a lot of energy.
Eat, eat, eat, eat, eat.
And of course if we look at the degree to which obesity is becoming a huge problem.
I mean, Mexico, I think, is the most obese nation in the world.
Throughout the West, particularly in America, obesity is becoming a huge problem because we have excess food.
K-strategists don't get fat when there's excess food.
They tend to store, they tend to hoard, right?
But our strategists, they eat, eat, eat, eat, eat.
And in general, they have poorer health.
They tend to be viewed as adults more quickly, so child soldiers and so on, and sexual abuse of children, of course, is treating children as sexual agents prior to them being sexual agents.
They're less well-educated.
They have more and earlier sexual contacts, earlier pregnancies, and larger families.
Quote, their newborns are more likely to be underweight, more prone to die, and more likely to be abandoned or to receive little attention.
These are people raised in stressful environments.
Moreover, adults are more likely to engage in risky, opportunistic activities that are attractive in the short term, but detrimental.
In the long term, resulting in higher levels of criminality, militarism, violence, gangs, drug abuse, gambling, smoking, drinking, risky sexual behavior, promiscuity without AIDS protection for instance, dangerous driving, and accidents at work.
Prey species have to go and eat.
And they can't be freaking out the whole time about predation, about being preyed upon, so they're not very good at recognizing and responding to danger, which is why they tend to end up being a prey species, just being risky by being alive.
And so this is a fairly well-known phenomenon that the R-selected are less capable of recognizing dangers.
So here's an example of how this could play out as a way of understanding the baby boom.
Quote, stress during childhood is expected to produce R-type reproductive behavior during adulthood.
This may explain the post-war baby boom, which lasted from about 1950 to 1965, i.e.
one generation after the economic depression of the 1930s and war, Second World War, of course, ending in 1945.
If the increased birth rate was due merely to improved economic conditions, then it should have lasted at least into the 1970s.
An alternative explanation is that the stress undergone by small children in the period 1930-1945 raised their fertility so as to prepare them to have large families by the time they became adult themselves.
The next generation raised in more comfortable K-like surroundings was less fertile, and this effect became only more pronounced as economic and social development continued.
I mean, lots of people in the post-war baby boom had like six kids per family.
And that's because, at least according to this theory, a lot of stress in the 1930s and 1940s, and this produces high fertility, and that's the reason why.
Such ongoing hormone-regulated fertility reduction might even explain the observed decrease in sperm count in Western societies.
Which is usually attributed to pollution, I would argue, or keyboards.
An alternative RK model-based explanation may find support in the finding that, at least in one study, the decline correlated with the year of birth for men born in the period 1950 to 1970, i.e.
the generation whose fertility fell most sharply.
1950 to 1970, economic booms.
There was a Cold War and so on, but economic booms, relative stability within the Western societies, therefore you get lower fertility.
Now, the RK hypothesis, it's important not to think it's just wealth and poverty.
It focuses on uncertainty or risk is the main factor.
So, our behavior is diminished in countries with a low per capita gross domestic product, but which are otherwise predictable and safe.
So, for instance, the Indian state of Kerala.
Eastern Europe, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, was poor but relatively stable.
On the other hand, more wealthy but unstable and violent societies, such as South Africa, certain Arab and Latin American countries, and inner cities in the United States, tend to exhibit more R characteristics.
Wealthier, but more chaotic and violent.
The RK theory explains the demographic transition.
This is a universally recognized and documented phenomenon that, as a population becomes socially and economically more developed, Its fertility drops enormously.
Average number of births per woman falls from 7 or 8 to less than 2.
Because you're shifting from R to K.
It suggests, quote, It suggests that the best way to reduce unsustainable population in the long term is to increase the general level of physical, psychological, social, and economic security in the population.
It also explains why less developed minorities, such as Arabs in Israel, Gypsies in Eastern Europe or Hispanics in the U.S. tend to increase in share of the population, threatening to overtake the majority.
It's an old saying that says, The best contraception is industrialization.
And this explains that.
So, let's try and encapsulate this into sort of one big picture.
This is going to be a taste of part three in particular, but I want to give you the incentive to keep going with this, I think, very essential information.
You really need to understand the world, the rise and fall of civilizations.
You've got to understand R versus K. In general, you can say R is more on the left, and K is more on the right.
And we'll go more into the genetics, epigenetics, and biology of that in part three of this series.
But what I want to get across just in this particular moment is that I want you to think of R and K as gene sets.
As all gene sets, they try to reproduce.
They want to reproduce themselves, right?
And they're in competition with each other, right?
The more K a society is, the less R is supported.
in reproduction.
The more our society is, the more harried and threatened and overtaxed K becomes.
So I want you to think of, like, you know, like Alien, like the thing that pops out of John Hurt's, hope you get better, John Hurt's belly, in Alien.
I want you to think that we have these animals inside us, you know, bunnies and wolves, bunnies and wolves inside us, right?
Now, these animals, these genetic sets, want to create an environment where they can flourish.
Like beavers want to dam up and we want to build houses and all that.
Now I want you to think of something like, where there is an excess of resources, R flourishes.
The R gene set flourishes.
Now, think of on the left.
Do they like the welfare state?
Do they like the money printing?
Do they like the debt?
Do they like the borrowing?
In other words, do they have any fundamental problems?
But they generally know.
So, I want you to think of This highly verbally adept, sophisticated, dangerous bunny.
Sounds crazy, but it's true.
Welfare, the welfare state, not charity.
Charity is limited.
There's lots of charity in case societies and people on the right are generally more generous when it comes to giving to charity than people on the left.
But the welfare state showers and rains down resources on people, particularly on the poor.
Trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars have been poured into poor communities.
That creates a situation of Very high abundance.
I'm not saying it makes them all rich.
I'm just saying it creates massive abundance relative to charity and so on, which is much more discriminating.
So wherever there's massive abundance, R strategies flourish.
And so the fact that people on the left who manifest the R strategy argue for more resources being poured at people is how the R reproduces itself.
It creates the illusion of abundance by borrowing money, by printing money, by getting off the gold standard.
That's a K limiting standard.
Go pump money at the poor.
Go create.
Go borrow.
Go into debt.
Put out bonds.
Forget the future.
Forget the future.
Resources now.
That is how the our philosophy, the our political philosophy creates a system, a situation, a world, a society, an economy which It creates more r-people, creates more r-gene sets.
It's the r-bunny using our political ideology to create more r-bunnies to breed with and more r-bunnies in the long run.
Ks, on the other hand, are like, ooh, think of conservatives, ooh, national debt, ooh, that's bad!
Because they're concerned about long-term consequences because that's the K strategy.
Particularly the one that came out of agriculture and livestock farming and so on.
They... Liberals don't care about the national debt.
Conservatives are... National debt?
That's our seed crop.
We've got to think about the future.
We can't just... And now... And... The... Our mindset is competition averse.
They don't like the free markets.
They want everyone to get along.
They want to resolve disputes with the government.
They don't want people to duke it out themselves.
Whereas conservatives are pro-free market.
They're fine with competition.
Yeah, let the best man win.
Not everyone gets the medal, right?
Not everyone gets the banner.
So each gene set is striving to create a world that furthers its own reproduction.
Because there is an incompatibility.
these two gene sets are at war in human society.
They're predator and prey with each other.
So our, the our genetic mindset, strives to create a world of instability, predation, danger combined with limitless resources.
Now, this instability is manifested by the fact that people on the left tend to be utopians.
We're gonna engineer society There's going to be central planning.
We're going to fix all these problems.
We're going to no more poor.
We're going to change the way that health care is delivered.
We're going to change these regulations, these laws, these tax codes.
We're going to make sure we're going to change everything.
This creates a dangerous and stable environment where no one can predict a goddamn thing.
No one!
That's perfect!
That is the deep soil in which the R Reproductive mindset and genes work.
This is the soil they need to grow.
The utopianism on the left is our gene set creating instability which furthers the production of more our gene sets.
They're breeding through utopianism.
On the right, conservatives, what do they want?
They want stable rules.
Predictable outcomes.
Well, not predictable, predictable rules.
I don't want things to be different now.
You are not utopian.
We just want stable rules that everyone can play fairly and may the best man win.
The R strategies, the R, the rabbit demons within the left, they want to get rid of fathers.
Because if you can get fathers out of the family, you are producing R's like rabbits.
So there's this denigration of marriage, there's this denigration of men, this hatred of the patriarchy, and this promotion of strong, heroic, female single moms.
That's on the left.
Oh, the government can be your daddy, right?
Because the government can shower resources, get rid of the dad, shower resources.
You've got the perfect storm for production of our personality types, of our breeding types.
You're replacing the infinite grass of the rabbit world with the seemingly infinite currency of the state.
Get rid of the dads!
Get the dads out of there!
And this is why people on the left tend to be so hostile towards males and patriarchs and so on, right?
On the other hand, on the right, what do they want?
They want stable families, monogamy.
Right?
They want predictability, and they want strong fathers, because that all breeds the K mindset, and the K genetics get to flourish in that environment.
So, civilization starts with K.
With high investment in offspring, with self-restraint, with control, with a concern about long-term consequences, and with a desire to create an equal and predictable playing field, that's where civilization starts.
And it flourishes!
And then there's all this excess money!
And then the R-strategists say, well, you've got to care about the poor, you've got to, you know, what about the poor, what about the uneducated, what about the single moms, you know, who through no fault of their own, right?
So then they start pulling resources, pulling resources and applying them to social problems and creating this random, world-bag, kaleidoscopic mind-hell of utopianism and constantly shifting sands of new rules all the time.
Tens of thousands of regulations pouring out of the government, designed to fix every problem, but creating an unstable environment, which is the breeding ground for the R gene set.
Now, the First and Second World War in the West killed off a lot of Ks.
It did.
It killed off a lot of Ks.
And as a result, the K in-group preference died with them.
And so on the left, you get a real focus on a denigration of in-group preferences, right?
I mean, for the dominant, for the white Western Europeans and so on, right?
Multiculturalism, everyone's equal, blahdy blahdy blah, right?
There's no in-group preference on the left, because it's R, and R doesn't have an in-group preference.
In fact, R's, in human terms, R's will often line with K's of another tribe in order to wipe out the K's in their own tribe, To gain more power for the R's.
Anyway, this is one of the... Jane Fonda, Hannah... Anyway.
So, this division between humanity, between the R and the K genetics and mindsets manifests itself in political philosophy.
We're going to go into much more detail with examples in part three.
Part two, we've got to establish that there's biological basis and genetic basis, otherwise the whole gene wars theory doesn't work.
But I'm going to submit to you and make the case, and it will blow your mind.
When you get it, it will blow your mind and you will not be able to look at the news, at politics, at philosophy, at relations between the genders, at feminism.
You won't be able to look at any of that the same way once you bring this into your mindset in a fixed way.
But I want to make the case that what we call politics, what we call philosophy, is a wrestling between the R and the K mindsets to create conditions which allow each individual genetic structure to propagate, to breed, to try to create fertile soil for their own seeds.
But what is fertile for the R kills the K, what is fertile for the K kills the R. This is why people get so hysterical, because on the left they're driven by R And when people say, well, we should have private charity rather than public welfare, when people say, we should have a balanced budget amendment, when people say, we should respect the role of fathers within the family, that is death, death itself, to the R gene set.
That will wipe the R gene set off the planet.
Conversely, the Ks look at the Rs and say, well, if you win, there's no place for us.
And this is why left and right is universal in almost all human societies that have ever been documented.
Left and right is universal because R&K is universal.
It's an adaptation strategy that's had billions of years to evolve and fine-tune itself and respond to local circumstances.
Lizards want to make everything warm, because that's how lizards flourish.
Penguins want to make everything cold, because that's how penguins flourish.
And in the same way, the R geneset wants to make everything chaotic and random and have excess resources, because that's the hothouse environment that allows them to flourish.
On the other hand, the K's, they want stability, predictability, a limit on resources.
They want stable monogamous families and two-parent households and high investment in kids because that's what allows that gene set to flourish.
And the reason things get so ferocious is that these two gene sets are fighting for survival in the political arena.
It's gene death.
to the K's if the R wins, and it's gene death for the R's if the K wins, and that's why it's so hysterical, and that's why it's so aggressive, and that's why it's so crazy to get into political arguments.
It's not abstract arguments.
It's arguments for base biological configuration, survival, and flourishing.
These are two species at war with each other and using us Like giant remote-control, flesh-based dreadnoughts that are using us to fight their battles for them.
Once we become aware of this, we can mediate that influence and actually begin to reason, rather than being on two different sides of a biological equation that can never ever be win-win.
I hope you'll join me for Part 2 of Gene Wars.
We'll go into the genetics and the biological evidence for what it is that I'm saying.
Part 3 will go into more details into the politics.
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