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The most successful life form on a planet will probably always ask themselves this. Because if we'd been happy remaining primitive then we wouldn't have become
by knorker 3y ago
The most successful life form on a planet will probably always ask themselves this.
Because if we'd been happy remaining primitive then we wouldn't have become advanced.
We were not happy after inventing technology (not with technology either, but we thought we would be).
Evolutionarily: The people who were happy without children, or another child, or a second wife to make more children, were not as successful in propagating their genes.
Why were peacocks not satisfied with a small slightly less colorful tail?
- Towaway69 3y ago> The most successful life form on a planet will probably always ask themselves this. I wonder what answer the dinosaurs had? Perhaps they were happy becoming the fuel of our technology millions of years later. _Most successful_ begs the question on what scale that would be?
- knorker 3y agoDinosaurs didn't become oil. Marine plants and animals did.
- AlexandrB 3y ago> Why were peacocks not satisfied with a small slightly less colorful tail? This is a weird analogy for all kinds of reasons. Not the least of which is that the extravagant tail (among other things) makes the bird highly specialized to a few environmental niches. Compare this to the humble rat that has been successful in just about any environment on the planet.
- randrus 3y agoSo ... the satisfied drop out of the gene pool and we're sampling from the lineage of the unsatisfied. Survivorship bias?
- knorker 3y agoYeah, with a bit of anthropic principle mixed in.