Art and Human Nature, Heritage Americans, Female Chimpanzees
Links and recommendations
From the archives:
How to Spot a Star
The Only Reading App I Use:
I’ve been using Readwise since April of 2021.
If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter/X, you’ll know I regularly share screenshots like this from books or articles I’ve read:
These screenshots come from my Readwise app.
Readwise aggregates your reading highlights from various sources like Kindle, Apple Books, Substack, Twitter, and so on. It stores your highlights in one place, making it easier to stay on top of your reading.
Each morning, it emails me 8 random excerpts from different books I’ve read. Since 2021, that daily message has been a quiet ritual for me: fragments from books I half‑forgot are resurfaced, like my own past self giving me a tap on the shoulder.
Moreover, when I’m thinking about a particular topic, a quick search pulls up not just my notes but every highlighted Kindle passage I’ve ever saved on the topic.
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Use this link → https://readwise.io/robkhenderson/ to try Readwise free for 60 days (double the length of the standard free trial).
I suspect, like me, you’ll wonder how you ever read without it.
Links and recommendations:
The Heritage Americans Have Already Been Replaced by Charles Fain Lehman
Vision, Discipline, and Staying Calm Under Fire by W. Keith Campbell
A Tale of Three Bestseller Lists by Kathleen Schmidt
More evidence that the NYT Bestseller list is pro-wrestling for intellectuals; everyone knows it’s fake but still buy into it. More on this point here
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Three interesting findings:
1. Female chimpanzees mate frequently—up to 50 times a day—with multiple males in their group. One function of this promiscuity is to confuse paternity: if a female has mated with many or all of the males in the community, each male may believe he could be the father of her infant, making him less likely to harm or kill it. (source: The Origin of Politics by Nicholas Wade).
2. Study with more than 11 thousand participants in 45 countries around the world encompassing North America, Asia, Africa, Western Europe, South America, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and other regions: Attractive men and women are viewed as relatively more intelligent, dominant, trustworthy, confident, responsible, caring, and sociable. They are also perceived to be both happier and less weird. (source).
3. The average age of a founder of a highly profitable tech company is 42.3 years old. The media-driven belief that successful founders tend to be young is untrue—older founders consistently have higher probabilities of success. (source: Don’t Trust Your Gut by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz).
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I am starting to hate some of your facile interpretations...."each male may believe he could be the father of her infant, making him less likely to harm or kill it."
So you are stating that chimpanzees are able to make such human-like complex interpretations ? I feel like you are anthropomorphizing onto a more primitive animal. What if chimpanzees can directly sense which offspring are theirs (via pheronomes or other physical characteristics of the baby) and this idea is just wrong ?
Perhaps the "reason" for female promiscuousness is that there are social/tribal benefits to the female which indirectly help with the survival of the baby.
It feels like you are simplifying and making assumptions (perhaps appropriate to humans) to justify your agreement with evolutionary psychology theoretical concepts of human behaviour.
The ideas are challenging and I enjoy reading and learning about these ideas.
But I feel like you are writing at a level beneath your abilities and gifts.
Quote: "Female chimpanzees mate frequently—up to 50 times a day—with multiple males in their group."
That's while in estrus I presume?