Rachell Powell
speaker
762 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 26 Jan
Rachell Powell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Obviously they're not, they don't have rituals around it, they don't have representations of the supernatural, presumably, right?
So what's the common between them?
Well, epidemiology, et cetera, right?
And so evolution is just working with what it has on hand.
It's working with the contingent proximate causes that just happen to be around that it can work with.
In social insects, you know, you're not going to have representations of the supernatural, but you have very predictable kind of like flexible fixed action patterns that you can work with if you're evolution.
Humans, tougher case because like we are very flexible and you got to fool us a different way.
So what happens?
Like we come up with these elaborate patterns
justifications, which are actually, they are the proximate cause, but they are not the evolutionary cause, and there is, they're arguably at least, if it works out this way, there is a common evolutionary cause, and really that's what the trait is.
It's not the supernatural attribution, that's kind of just a confabulatory way for evolution to get at what it needs to get at, namely the function.
And so I think if we start thinking about
Human traits that way, it changes quite dramatically how we think about ourselves.
And what I just said would be probably offensive to a lot of people.
Not in the circles that I'm arguing with, but like,
You know, like, oh, you're saying, you know, that really it's just all about epidemiology and we're the same as ants.
Well, but, you know, I mean, this is the problem with humanities, though.
The humanities wants to keep humans at the center.
And there's times when you sort of need to do that, but there's times where that really holds back knowledge and understanding.
And I think that this is one of those times.
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