Certain personality types, risk takers, for example, will gravitate towards specific fields, jobs and places. A recent NY Times article suggests that it would have been the risk takers who would settle a new country, like America. So the initial population would be all feisty, thrill-seeking individuals, and their offspring would have a high percentage of those genetic propensities, too. But as with other creatures, the long term evolutionary advantage is never to have too much of the population clumped into one type, so over many generations the normal statistical spread between timid, aggressive, curious or sex-mad individuals would occur. The nation would soften, become less wildly adventurous and aggressive. Or so one would think.
Naturally, the aggressive types would habitually find themselves in the jobs that satisfy their lusts — politics, big business, etc. — but the general population, over successive generations, would no longer be primarily the go-for-broke fanatics and frontiersmen that stomped out the nation. “Leaders”, by nature, will always be continually attempting to convince the more risk-averse to join in their bold new plans and schemes — and sometimes finding some resistance to these ventures, they will inevitably create workarounds — the NSA, the CIA, The Patriot Act, Homeland Security, Gitmo.
A series of articles in the latest issue of New Scientist picks up on a lot of the God, self-delusion and faith ideas I was getting at in the last posting, but in a more succinct way. Thanks to Antonio Perez, Manila for alerting me.
