Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "Joseph Henrich — Humans Defeated Smarter Species With Cultural Evolution" video.

  1. Just like Trump, who is the most important politician. ;-)
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  2. It is true, but nor for the mentioned reasons. Eurasia is simply where the required surface mineral deposits are. The Americas have lots and lots of minerals, but they are hard to get to without modern machinery. The North American Indians never had a chance.
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  3. You can't nap while grazing animals as long as large predators are around. When the lions and the wolves come you have to fight them off. Woman can, on average, not perform that highly dangerous function. Is it an evolutionary quirk that males are stronger and more aggressive? Probably. It didn't have to be that way. We have examples of other species where they are not. In humans however they are and sometimes that's a good thing and very often it is not.
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  4. My credit card is not that small. And yet it is the main reason why I don't want to have kids. Because I don't need to. ;-)
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  5. Cooking your food protects you from parasites. Parasites are incredibly nasty and taxing.
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  6. The good folks who drove the industrial revolution weren't Protestants. They were greedy. Unless, of course, you mean to say that Protestants are greedy? That I may agree with. :-)
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  7. Hardly. The industrial revolution in Europe gave you the Eiffel tower, silicon valley gives you computer games and the metaverse. The cultural uses of new technologies are vastly different between the old and the new world. There is very little valuable architecture in the US and what little there is is almost exclusively from the end of the 19th century to roughly WW II.
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  8. Einstein is a weird example of intellectual blindness. Quantum mechanics follows trivially from special relativity, but he just could not see it. One can also easily explain most of the "quantum mechanical weirdness" with dice as examples of uncertain physical processes, he just didn't think about it hard enough. He never got beyond the level of polemics, even though the physics is obvious.
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  9. You can buy better bows and arrows in your local sports shop than have EVER existed in the history of mankind. Medieval armies would have given arms and legs (literally) to get hold of modern compound bows and modern hardened arrowheads. What nonsense. We also never lost the digging stick. Today we are simply mounting a thousand of them behind a tractor.
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  10. Yes, that is total bullshit. ;-)
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  11. Christianity didn't built the modern world. The freedom from it did. ;-)
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  12. Wow, that gets the price for being the most stupid interview in the history of the internet. The industrial revolution got already started in Rome and Greece before the advent of Christianity, it simply got stopped by economic collapse after the third or fourth century AD. The Greek and the Romans were very much into machines like water driven grain mills (and so were Medieval people, by the way, they just couldn't afford all that many of them) and they would not have been able to prosper without a significant level of automation and mass manufacturing techniques.
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