The human mind and the peacock’s tail may serve similar biological functions. The peacock’s tail is the classic example of sexual selection through mate choice. It evolved because peahens (female peac...
Existing political philosophies all developed before evolutionary game theory, so they do not take equilibrium selection into account. Socialism pretends that individuals are not selfish sexual compet...
Scientific theories never dictate human values, but they can often cast new light on ethical issues. From a sexual selection viewpoint, moral philosophy and political theory have mostly been attempts...
You could be the fittest person imaginable in terms of strength, intelligence, disease resistance and vitality, but if you fail to reproduce your contribution to the future of the human gene pool is z...
Dismissing the idea that female choice could influence the direction of evolution began to look both sexist and unscientific. By drawing attention to the evolution of social and sexual behavior in ani...
Men write more books. Men give more lectures. Men ask more questions after lectures. Men post more e-mail to Internet discussion groups. To say this is due to patriarchy is to beg the question of the...
The healthy brain theory proposes that our minds are clusters of fitness indicators: persuasive salesmen like art, music, and humor, that do their best work in courtship, where the most important deal...
Capitalism is not materialistic, but semiotic. It concerns mainly the psychological world of signs, symbols, images, and brands,
The ad does not say Buy this!; it says, Be assured that if you buy and display this product, others are being well trained to feel ugly and inferior in your presence, just as you feel ugly and inferio...
Thus, all ads effectively have two audiences: potential product buyers, and potential product viewers who will credit the product owners with various desirable traits.
David Buss has amassed a lot of evidence that human females across many cultures tend to prefer males who have high social status, good income, ambition, intelligence, and energy--contrary to the view...
Ecologists have long understood that the typical interaction between any two individuals or species is neither competition nor cooperation, but neutralism. Neutralism means apathy: the animals just ig...
Scientists have no more status than what other scientists award them through citations, talk invitations, and tenure. Status makes a misleadingly concrete-sounding
At the other extreme, the consumption tax rate should be very, very high for any products that impose massive negative externalities. Consider handgun ammunition. Currently, one can buy five hundred r...
By intelligently choosing their sexual partners for their mental abilities, our ancestors became the intelligent force behind the human mind’s evolution.
Thus, consumption taxes tend to reduce conspicuous consumption and promote longer-term retirement security, family wealth, social welfare, technical progress, and economic growth. In essence, income t...
Our responsibility is not to speculate endlessly about the possible futures of our daughter species, but to become, with as much panache as we can afford, their ancestors.
Many thinkers have tried to naturalize consumerism in that way, including most social Darwinists, Austrian School economists (Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard), Chicago School econom...
One problem with most current governments is that they prioritize economic growth (as mismeasured by GDP per capita) over citizens’ happiness, quality of life, efficiency of trait display, and breadth...
You may think that tax policy sounds like the most boring topic in the world. That is precisely what most governments, corporations, and special interests would like you to think, because tax policy i...
Showing 1 to 20 of 22 results