Macken Murphy

speaker

521 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Macken Murphy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Modern Wisdom · The New Science Of Female Attraction - Psychology Roundtable - #1133 · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

They're like, well, then I don't really need to date for money.

That's fine.

So I take an evolutionary anthropological approach.

My whole background is anthropology.

And so it's slightly different from the evo-psych approach where there's actually this maneuver that's used in evo-anthro work, which is called the phenotypic gambit, where you basically say, well, I don't really know what's happening inside the mind.

The mind is a bit of a black box.

But I'm interested in the inputs and I'm interested in the outputs.

So let me change the inputs and see if the outputs match what you would expect from a strategic perspective.

So look, it could be the case that it was purely conscious strategic thinking, which is also an evolved trait, right?

That's an evolved ability that we should use presumably in ways that help our fitness.

Otherwise, it couldn't have evolved.

If strategic thinking didn't improve fitness, it wouldn't evolve.

But there have been some scholars like Gangestad in 2006 who have played with the idea that there might actually be a domain specific evolved psychological module in the mind.

that is designed to essentially detect scarcity and change your resource preferences to some degree.

I'm not sure if he focused on scarcity.

He looked at a couple variables, but I do remember that he did posit this.

So I'm open to the idea that there's some evolved resource scarcity detection thing, but I don't know because the experiment didn't test that.

It just tested the inputs and outputs.

That's exactly what we wrote in the paper.

Well, yeah, this is actually something that's controversial in anthropology because it's true that if you go off of modern hunter-gatherers, then you do get this impression that like, oh, scarcity is the norm.

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