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Paying it forward: An article by David Graeber I first saw here, where he argues the utilitarian evolutionary view (every action witnessed in animals is there
by he11ow 4y ago
Paying it forward:
An article by David Graeber I first saw here, where he argues the utilitarian evolutionary view (every action witnessed in animals is there to somehow increase changes of survival) is a relic of the industrial revolution. Instead, he says, playing is a key feature of life.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-hav...
- abfan1127 4y agowhat says play doesn't increase the chance of survival?
- guerrilla 4y agoIf you spend any time researching play at all, you'll find that's pretty much a universal view among scientists who study it. It's essential training and learning for survival. Love Graeber, RIP, but if that's something he claimed then he's unfortunately off on that one.
- abfan1127 4y agosorry, the universal rule is play isn't important, or the universal rule is play is important? Also, do you have some leads on sources? I'd be interested on reading up on this.
- guerrilla 4y agoI don't understand your first question... I think this[1] would be your definitive resources but if you can just search for "evolution of play" then you'll find a lot of stuff. Wikipedia has a hodgepodge of perspectives in section on the purpose of play [2] but you might be better off tracking down those citations. 1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-handbook-of-play/evolution-of-play/9EAFEDC059FB72E575809219BDB444E0 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-handbook-... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_(activity)#Development_and_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_(activity)#Development_an...
- puzzledobserver 4y agoI might be misunderstanding Graeber, but I thought his point was that by viewing play through the calculus of evolution and survival probabilities, scientists have not paid as much attention to the fact that play is fun. How did animals come to play? Because it allows them to explore their environment and increases their evolutionary fitness. Why do animals continue to play? Because they enjoy it.
- _0ffh 4y agoMaking you enjoy it is nature's trick to make sure you do it's bidding.
- Vrondi 4y agoI thought that it has long since been understood that any trait which does not inhibit reproduction is ignored by natural selection, and therefore does not get "weeded out" by the process of evolution. This is why there can be long standing diversity within populations.
- throwanem 4y agoI love the optimism, but regret to report that this simple aspect of natural selection is anything but widely understood.
- inerte 4y agoRIP David “Debt: The First 5000 Years” is mind boggling and I hold it as high as Sapiens. In some ways it’s actually better when explaining what people actually did instead of our idealized views.
- jancsika 4y ago> This would be the reaction of most professional ethologists as well. A behaviorist maybe, but an ethologist? * an ethologist surely knows that gene mutations can be advantageous for the family/group as well as the individual * an ethologist surely knows that a previous advantage for survival can persist as a vestige * an ethologist can surely rinse and repeat to find all kinds of fascinating combinations in living organisms which-- while they may not disadvantage the organism-- cannot be explained in the present as construing any clear survival advantage Those alone are enough to develop an incremental path out of the narrow rational view that Graeber ascribes to Ethology's history. I can't imagine Ethology didn't already get there. Ethologists: what say you? Edit: Related process in an unrelated field-- early 20th Century German comparitive musicology eventually became the perfectly reasonable and relativist field of Ethnomusicology. AFAICT Ethnomusicologists kept the instrument taxonomy and the ethnologies, and then got off the "gold standard" of high-Romantic German art music. :)