Seeking wisdom from darwin to munger pdf free download

Now we reach a key question: What part of the value system is called "human nature? Our genes provide us with the framework for neural development and our life experiences and our environment shapes our brain. Since the brain is formed by life experiences and since an individual doesn't keep doing what doesn't work learns through trial and error , evolution has reinforced the behavior and values that help us survive and reproduce.

This behavior must be the behavior that was adaptive in the environment in which humans spent most of their evolutionary history. The question then becomes: What was the operating environment in which the human brain evolved? The hunter-gatherer environment has formed our basic nature Human evolution started about 4 to 7 million years ago and today's "modern" human brain appeared on the scene some , to , years ago.

For most of that time our ancestors lived in primitive hunter-gatherer societies. These societies existed until the end of the last Ice Age, around 13, years ago. Soon thereafter, some 10, years ago, agriculture was developed. If we compress 4 million years into 24 hours, and if the history of humans began at midnight, agriculture made its appearance on the scene 23 hours and 55 minutes later. If the conditions and challenges of the hunter gatherer environment is the environment in which natural selection has selected the adaptive traits for survival and reproduction, we must find out what the environment looked like back then.

What drove our ancestors' evolution? What were the characteristics of the environment that have shaped today's brains? What were the environmental conditions in which the hunter-gatherers lived? What was the availability of resources like food and mates?

How was the climate and the geography? Social environment? Size of population? What enemies, predators, and dangers existed? There is no observational evidence from the hunter-gatherer environment. People were living in small villages where everyone knew everyone else and strangers didn't show up often. There were enemies, predators and diseases. Limited resources created competition for food and mates. What different roles did men and women likely play? Men were responsible for hunting, and defending the group from predators and enemies.

Women gathered and prepared food near the home, and cared for the children. If this were the environment, what would be appropriate behavior to increase the likelihood for survival and reproduction?

There are individual men and women, and there are families. Yes, one basic trait that aU individuals share is self-interest.

We are interested in protecting our close family and ourselves. Since natural selection is about survival and reproduction, and individuals either survive or die and reproduce or not, it makes sense that individuals are predisposed to act in ways that enhance their own prospects for survival and reproduction.

The ancestral environment consisted of limited resources, including reproductive resources, and fierce competition. Self-interest came naturally. What if our ancestors were composed of altruists - individuals that helped others at their own expense? Altruistic individuals are at a disadvantage. They are always vulnerable to some mutants that take advantage of them. Altruistic behavior cannot evolve by natural selection since natural selection favors individuals that are best at promoting their own survival and reproductive success.

Only behavior that is selfish or for the mutual good is in an individual's self-interest and therefore favored by natural selection. Some behavior may under certain conditions look like altruism but can often be explained by self-benefit.

Social recognition, prestige, fear of social disapproval, shame, relief from distress, avoidance of guilt, a better after-life or social expectations are some reasons behind "altruistic" acts.

But how did our social and moral qualities develop? As Charles Darwin wrote in chapter four of The Descent ofMan: "Why should a man feel that he ought to obey one instinctive desire rather than another?

Why does he bitterly regret ifhe has yielded to the strong sense of self-preservation, and has not risked his life to save that of a fellow- creature; or why does he regret having stolen food from severe hunger?

We may therefore conclude that primeval man, at a very remote period, would have been influenced by the praise and blame of his fellows. It is obvious, that the members of the same tribe would approve of conduct which appeared to them to be for the general good, and would reprobate that which appeared evil.

To do good unto others - to do unto others as ye would they should do unto you, - is the foundation-stone of morality. It is, therefore, hardly possible to exaggerate the importance during rude times of the love of praise and the dread of blame. A man who was not impelled by any deep, instinctive feeling, to sacrifice his life for the good of others, yet was roused to such actions by a sense of glory, would by his example excite the same wish for glory in other men, and would strengthen by exercise the noble feeling of admiration.

He might thus do far more good to his tribe than by begetting offspring with a tendency to inherit his own high character. A high standard of morality would also benefit a tribe.

Darwin continues: It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an advancement in the standard of morality and an increase in the number of well- endowed men will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another.

Often cooperation is in our best interest Ifpeople aren't altruistic by nature, are they cooperative? Mutual aid has tremendous survival value. But under what conditions do people cooperate? The game of the Prisoner's Dilemma may shed light on this: Suppose you and a partner commit burglary. Both of you are picked up by the police who then question you one by one.

There is not enough evidence to convict you unless one of you confesses. The interrogator gives you a choice to cooperate or not. From an outsider's perspective, it seems that both of you would be better off denying the crime 1 year. But from your point of view, it seems best to confess freedom. The problem is that you don't know what your partner will do. If your partner betrays you, it is better that you also betray him and get 3 years in prison, instead of the 10 years you get if you deny, but your partner ends up confessing.

If on the other hand your partner denies, it is still better that you confess because this way you will be free, instead of the 1 year you get if you deny. Since both you and your partner follow this "logic" and confess, you will both go to jail for 3 years. Doing what you believe is in your best interest leads to a worse outcome than if you cooperate and deny. But here is the dilemma.

You don't know if you can trust your partner. Cooperation only works if you and your partner can trust each other. Tests show that if people play the game over and over, they learn that it is more profitable to cooperate. Repetition tests trust. Trust is key and fragile. It can vanish in a moment. As the 19th Century American President Abraham Lincoln wrote: "If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.

Talking encourages cooperation. Since people are social animals, they may change their behavior to keep others goodwill. In the end, it's a matter of trust and giving individuals an incentive to cooperate. In chapter three of The Descent ofMan, Charles Darwin wrote: At the moment of action, man will no doubt be apt to follow the stronger impulse; and though this may occasionally prompt him to the noblest deeds, it will far more commonly lead him to gratifY his own desires at the expense of other men.

But after their gratification, when past and weaker impressions are contrasted with the ever-enduring social instincts, retribution will surely come. Man will then feel dissatisfied with himself, and will resolve with more or less force to act differently for the future.

This is conscience; for conscience looks backwards and judges past actions, inducing that kind of dissatisfaction, which if weak we call regret, and if severe remorse.

But we also have to recognize that communication may be deceptive. People may bluff Also, communications are imperfect - mistakes are made or intentions are misunderstood. It says that we should cooperate at the first meeting and then do whatever our "opponent" did the last time.

When our opponent doesn't cooperate, we should retaliate. Then forgive and go back to cooperating next round. This rewards past cooperation and punishes past defection.

This assumes that the game is repeated time after time. In reality we never know if we meet our opponent again in the future.

As long as neither our opponent nor we knows when the game ends, it pays to be nice. Of course, the game of the Prisoner's Dilemma is only a two-player game. Reality often involves many-person interactions. There is one group that scientists say we treat better than others - our close genetic relatives.

This is kin selection. We act altruistic to our kin because they share our genes. Studies show that in all social species, relatives are more likely to help each other. The greater degree ofgenetic relatedness between two individuals, the more likely it is that an individual treats the other individual better. If you sacrifice something for your children, it may harm you but since your children share your genes, the overall effect is positive.

Scientists say that one test of kin selection is what we would do if a relative and a good friend were both close to drowning. We can only save one of them. What ifone of them was a distant cousin that you'd seen only twice in your life and the friend was a person you spent every day with?

Who would you save? What other behavior was appropriate for our ancestors? A tendency for fear Our fiars are always more numerous than our dangers. Two hours after takeoff, the flight attendant heard suspicious noise from the lavatory. The passengers started to talk among themselves. Panic erupted. We fear dramatic and threatening events. We fear the loss of our health, family, friends, security, money, social status, power, or jobs. We also fear violence, crime, punishment, rejection, failure, the unknown, the immediate, the unpredictable or the uncontrollable.

Studies show that even witnessing a traumatic event can produce the same fear response as experiencing the event ourselves. Fear is our most basic emotion. Fear has evolved to help us anticipate danger and avoid pain. As science writer Rush Dozier writes in Fear Itself "Fear is fundamental because life is fundamental. If we die, everything else becomes irrelevant.

Our ancestors environment was fraught with dangers. Self-survival was a powerful incentive. Mistakes could be extremely costly.

Assume two individuals heard a strange sound behind the bushes. One of them looked behind the bushes, was bit by a poisonous snake and died. The other one saw what happened, ran away and survived. To always assume there was a threat behind the bushes and run away could save an individual's life. The cost of being wrong and running when there was no snake was minimal. But the cost of staying around when there was a snake could be life threatening.

Failure to detect threats is often more costly than false alarms. Our ancestors learned through trial and error that in the long run, pain could be avoided if they were fearful. They survived the dangers because they learned how to respond. If pain and pleasure are guides to the behavior that leads to survival and reproduction, fear is our biological warning signal for avoiding pain.

Fear warns us of potential harm and keeps us from acting in self-destructive ways. It helps us avoid threats and makes us act to prevent further damage. Fear guides us to avoid what didn't work in the past. Fear causes worry and anxiety, a normal response to physical danger. It activates hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, which keeps us attentive to harm since we need full attention to escape from a threat.

The degree of fear we feel depends on our interpretation of the threat and our perception of control. The more helpless and vulnerable we feel, the stronger our emotion for fear becomes. Assume that you are walking alone late at night on a deserted street in New York City. Suddenly, you hear steps behind you. What happens? Immediately you fear the worst - robbery, assault, etc. Your autonomic nervous system takes over and prepares you for fight or flight.

Your response begins in your brain and activates a biochemical process. Your heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, pulse and blood sugar increase. Normal behavior when you are the victim of stress, either perceived or real. You reacted with fear on the deserted street because evolution equipped your brain to register pain more sensitively than any other emotion. You were using the "memory" of your ancestral past - your primitive fear system of fight or flight.

What we fear and the strength of our reaction depend on our genes, life experiences, and the specific situation. You may react instinctively at first, but if the situation is one that you've experienced before since our brain is continuously being "rewired" with life experiences , the final reaction may be to calm down.

You could turn around to find an old lady walking her dog. Or you may run away, because you avoid situations that in the past have been painful.

If you for example had walked the same deserted street many times before but found out each time that the noise was the old lady walking her dog, you would be less careful.

Until something terrifying happened. Often our emotions provide affective information that helps us make better decisions. For example, guilt may make us regret doing wrong things, and correct them. It may also induce cooperation. Disgust seems to be a response to danger to protect us from disease or harm.

Shame may help us avoid certain temptations or reduce the risk of group-conflict. People who can't experience emotional responses because of brain damage seem unable to learn from their mistakes or to make choices in a coherent manner. Seeking explanations '1 ate a plant and now I feel sick. Therefore, I believe the plant was not goodfor me.

We need to categorize, classify, organize, and structure the world. Categorizing ideas and objects helps us to recognize, differentiate and understand. It simplifies life. To understand and control our environment helps us to deal with the future.

We want to know how and why things happen and what is going to happen in the future. To understand how an event happened helps us predict how it could happen again. This is why we always look for patterns and causal relationships among objects, actions, and situations. This makes it easier to identify and understand things and to make predictions based on similarities in patterns.

Finding and recognizing connections between things and events in our environment helps us to learn what does and does not work. Patterns also give us comfort, making our need to find them even more important.

To learn what works and does not and what is good or bad for us means we have to explore. Exploring our environment successfully enables our survival and reproduction. Remembering places, facts and events is important. But sometimes, the brain seems particularly attracted to new information and novel experiences.

Recent studies suggest that the brain responds to novelty. The unknown is potentially rewarding, thereby motivating us to explore our environment and learn for the future. We must be flexible in order to deal with constant change and unpredictability. We often explore the unknown in a random fashion. Then they move towards it. Being flexible and learning a variety of options to choose from to deal with the world is of great value. This implies that finding new ways to deal with the world is superior to overtraining old patterns.

For example, studies of honeybees show that they navigate according to a map-like organization of spatial memory. When bees are over-trained to find a single nectar site, it is easy for them to find their way back to the hive from that site, but not very well from other sites. But when the same bees are trained to many nectar sites, they are much better in finding their way home to the hive from a range of different locations.

Further studies suggest that we learn better when we mix new information with what we already know. Making fast classifications There is a story about a man who went to visit a professor at his home. Outside the house a dog was playing on the lawn. When the professor opened the door to let the man in, the dog ran into the house. Later the professor asked the man, "Do you always travel with your dog?

I thought it was yours. Limited time and knowledge in a dangerous and scarce environment made hasty generalizations and stereotyping vital for survival. Waiting and weighing evidence could mean death. Don't we often draw fast conclusions, act on impulse and use our emotions to form quick impressions and judgments? We are especially wary of things that move. They may imply danger. That is why we automatically assume agency - someone was responsible - when we detect motion.

Better safe than sorry. Males and females have different priorities "What is the brain for? Put more completely, the brain exists to make better decisions about how to enhance reproductive success. Once an individual has survived past the age of reproduction, the individual is evolutionarily useless.

The struggle to reproduce can sometimes have peculiar effects. In nature, things are not always what they seem. WHY does the ant persist in climbing the grass? How does the ant benefit? There is no benefit to the ant. Its behavior was manipulated by a parasitic flatworm that needed to get into the gut of the sheep in order to reproduce.

By commandeering its intermediate ant host to climb to the tips of the grass blades, the parasite increased the ant's chances of being eaten by a grazing animal. The benefit was to the reproductive success of the parasite, not the ant.

Another parasite, Toxoplasma, can only reproduce within cats. It causes rats to lose their inherited fear of cats cat scent and thereby makes the rat more likely to end up as cat dinner.

Another parasite causes fish to swim in shallow waters so birds can eat them, this parasite's final host. Most animals including humans do something to attract the opposite sex. Since natural selection is ultimately about reproduction in a world of limited mates, some individuals were better at getting mates than others. The individuals that had an advantage in attracting prospective mates were "selected.

What anatomical features or behavioral traits attract the opposite sex or intimidate rivals? Darwin realized that many anatomical and behavioral characteristics didn't have any survival value but could play an important role in attracting mates. Strength and beauty were such signals. He called this mechanism sexual selection. It has for example been shown that colors spark sexual interest among butterflies. And peahens prefer peacocks with big, colorful tails. In Parental Investment and Sexual Selection, biologist Robert Trivers says that the force behind sexual selection is parental investment, or "any investment by the parent in an individual offspring that increases the offspring's chance of surviving and hence reproductive success at the cost of the parent's ability to invest in other offspring.

But they also need to keep other men away from "their" woman. A woman must invest in each of her children. There is a nine month pregnancy and thereafter many years of child-caring. She invests time, energy and increases her chance of earlier death. There are limits to how many children she can produce during her lifetime. A man has less costs of reproduction. He can interact with many women and produce an enormous amount of children. He doesn't need to be around all the time.

Many women can raise their children without help. Since the goal of evolution is reproduction, a man should want to have sex with as many women as possible.

This causes competition among men for women. He can either make himself more attractive to the woman or he can eliminate or reduce the competition. The reproductive success of women doesn't depend on how many men she has sex with, but on her ability to get access to resources like food, shelter, and protection for herself and her children. Women are therefore more discriminating than men. She won't pick the first guy around. This causes women to compete with each other for access to resources.

A man that is perceived as wealthy and having status has an advantage. So mating choices showing up as unconscious preferences are influenced by the fact that women have more at stake than men do.

In , Psychology Professor David Buss published a study of thousands of men and women from 37 cultures around the world showing the ranking of qualities that are most important in choosing someone to date or marry. Women placed more emphasis on a potential mate's financial prospects. Women also preferred ambitious and industrious men.

Women preferred older men. Men preferred younger women. Men ranked physical attractiveness higher than women did. The study also showed that a man felt most jealous when his woman was having sex with someone else. A woman felt most jealous when her man became emotionally attached to someone else.

Studies show other differences between the sexes. Women are less inclined to take risks. They are more influenced by the chance of loss. They are less competitive and status-conscious. Other studies show that men and women differ in their behavioral and cognitive capabilities. It may change the way you think and act in business and in life. ISBN Your tags:. Send-to-Kindle or Email Please login to your account first Need help?

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It may takes up to minutes before you received it. What do we want out of life? What interferes with our goals? Read and study this wonderful multidisciplinary exploration of wisdom. It may change the way you think and act in business and in life. Download H. Best book torrent sites Download it here and read it on your Kindle device. Novels - upcoming H.

New H. Check this ebook now Pages Published Publisher. It is in the spirit of Charles Munger, who says, "All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there.

An understanding of how and why we can "die" should help us avoid them. We can't eliminate mistakes, but we can prevent those that can really hurt us. Using exemplars of clear thinking and attained wisdom, Bevelin focuses on how our thoughts are influenced, why we make misjudgments and tools to improve our thinking.

Bevelin tackles such eternal questions as: Why do we behave like we do?