The Informational Stakes of Dominance

The commodity that is immediately at stake in contests of dominance is information, and that feature differentiates dominance from predation in several ways. One is that while contests of dominance can escalate into lethal clashes, especially when the contestants are closely matched and intoxicated with positive illusions, most of the time (in humans and animals alike) they are settled with displays. The antagonists flaunt their strength, brandish their weapons, and play games of brinkmanship...

 Information Fertilizes Moral Growth

...a flow of information can fertilize moral growth. Scholars who have puzzled over the trajectory of material progress in different parts of the world, such as the economist Thomas Sowell in his Culture trilogy and the physiologist Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, have concluded that the key to material success is being situated in a large catchment area of innovations.306 No one is smart enough to invent anything in isolation that anyone else would want to use. Successful innovators...

 Art as an Evolutionary Fitness Indicator

To be reliable, fitness indicators must be difficult for low-fitness individuals to produce. Applied to human art, this suggests that beauty equals difficulty and high cost. We find attractive those things that could have been produced only by people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy, endurance, hand-eye coordination, fine motor control, intelligence, creativity, access to rare materials, the ability to learn difficult skills, and lots of free time. Also, like bow...

 Contents of the Doomsday Chest

The contents of a Doomsday Chest will include stainless steel or titanium sheets, laser etched with an archive of the fundamentals of human knowledge. Each sheet would be carved, front and back, in the five most widely spoken languages of the 21st Century; Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic and Hindi. To aid in their translation, aRosetta Disc style object would also embedded in the Chest, providing easy visual translation between the "key" languages and over 2,600 other languages. The le...