Holly of The Pervocracy just… gets it.

I agree that human behavior is evolved, but I believe that we evolved into humans. If we still had the hierarchies and behaviors of apes on the savannah, we’d be apes on the savannah. (Also, even apes are often more complex than Kanazawa assumes.) It’s like saying “dolphins are descended from land creatures with legs, therefore dolphins have legs.” And the idea that men are harem-keeping sperm machines and women are antler-contest-judging baby machines is some serious dolphin legs. Morality, creativity, abstraction, empathy—these are our flippers.

Read the quote in context here.

Hannah Arendt warned against what she called “ratomorphization” of humans (and sorry I couldln’t find the full quote.)

I do wonder sometimes whether we directely evolved the behavior of comparing ourselves to other animals or whether it’s just an indirect mutation of evolved religion-forming behavior?

You rarely see people saying things like “bulls charge the way they do because they have a common ancestor with tigers, which charge after prey.” Even though bulls and tigers do have hair because they share common ancestors.

But that’s not what I came here to talk about.

I just think you should go read the rest of Holly’s post on reproductive success (“in purely number-of-toes terms, that girl in India with four legs was the most successful woman in the world”) or women as “gatekeepers” (“If men will go for anything with a vagina, how can they also be such picky fucks?”) or women and “power” (“If I have a choice of having armies at my command and millions of acres of land and billions of dollars, or being able to fuck a dude… I’m not going go rub my chin and go ‘hmm, seems about even.”) Or how she summarizes her disdain for pop-ev-psych maestro Satoshi Kanazawa (“Sure he’s just some crazy fuck on the Internet, but he’s getting paid for this shit. By actual serious grownups. It blows my mind.”)

Awesome.