I say that because "High Aggression Variant" is synonymous with "Psychopathic" and "Anti-social". They will probably be the first, in the new taxonomy, to be the target of hate.
Realize this: Human beings want to belong to a group, but they also want to be special (of greater value than anyone else) and this provides the basis for these rigidly held (although abritrary) classifications. We are not content to see ourselves as identical in every respect with our neighbours. We want to look out our window at our neighbours and say "See that! That is what separates us, what makes me better." And so we invent ways of doing this.
However, our classifications serve a functional-analytic purpose, so it is a dual-purpose phenomena. One to improve our understanding through manipulation of discriminate symbols, and the other to improve our use of symbols for the purposes of manipluation and discrimination.
It's all arbitrary taxonomical classification. It started with Carlos Linneaus, father of modern Taxonomy. Linneaus' colour taxonomy is responsible for the racist attribution of color to ethnicity (e.g. Red, Yellow, Black, Brown, White, etc..)
If we were still using Linnean colour taxonomy we'd still be calling each other "Red Skins" and "Yellow Bellies". But no, we have replaced that outdated and racist taxonomy with something better, regional taxonomy. Now we are split by place of birth, but soon we can develop a new taxonomy based in genetic mutations. Hopefully I'll be part of the "Low-Aggression Variant" group.
Here is the solution: Realize that your ethnicity is entirely arbitrary and beyond your influence. Then get revenge by dressing up as Pee Wee Herman or Donald Trump.
I think women may tend to find female humor funnier.
I don't think evolutionary psychology is the best tool for explaining these things. Because evolutionary psychology in some way assumes that a trait would not exist if it was not evolutionarily adaptive. The brain of human beings changes throughout life, it adapts at much smaller time-scales than genes do. Evolutionary psychology also assumes we have no other mode than selfish. While I would tend to agree that we are selfish, I don't think it is all we are capable of.
Is humor a selfish act? In some cases it seems so. Humor is often used as a defense mechanism to avoid internalizing criticism. Other times it is used to elevate oneself, by laughing at an inferior. Perhaps our favourite thing to laugh at is human stupidity. There is a modicum (or more) of pride involved in such humor.
The subject of a person's joke often depends on them. That is, humor is subjective. It depends, like Saskia suggests on one's own experiences, sense of self, identities and so forth. We will tend to find more humor in domains that we ourselves excel at, because it is easy for us to look-down at situations within those domains.
As a child we find jokes like this funny: Q: What do you get when you cross a blizzard with a witch? A: A cold spell.
This kind of joke loses its humor as we age, the subject matter shifts to domains we derive our adult identity from (Sex, work, family, etc..)
One of my cousins posts a lot of sexist humor to her facebook wall. Pretty much all of it depicts men as useless invalids and I'm much more disturbed than provoked to laughter. She finds it funny because it strokes her ego.
The other part of that is "If you don't use it you lose it."
Just as the children's brains adapted to perform better on these particular tasks, the nutrients (Neurotrophins) that sustain the life of these cells cannot be given to them unless the cells are activated. Over periods of non-use the cells will atrophy and die.
Their performance is bound up in their practice of those tasks as well. A person's IQ score will steadily improve the more they take IQ tests. But that itself doesn't mean they can resolve an IRQ conflict, animate fluid physics in 3D, rebuild a transmission or perform open heart surgery. Those will need their own practice.
IQ is based in Spearman's G (g factor or General Intelligence). Though advanced systems like Weschler's Adult Intelligence Scale or Raven's Psychometrics seem to subdivide the g factor into different domains, one must admit that these divisions are ultimately arbitrary and has never succeeded in demonstrating itself to be accurate.
Various factors besides g contribute to IQ scores, some of which are quite pervasive and difficult to control for. Stereotype threat and cultural variations in IQ scores do not accord well with any theory of intelligence. An individual's performance appears more contextual than any intelligence quotient could ever measure. It is like trying to find the position of a subatomic particle.
And when you decontextualize the individual (and the subatomic particle) its behavior becomes sporadic. A child's performance on IQ tests should be considered in light of this and what kind of intrinsic motivators and demotivators are affecting the child's performance. I think, most of us are trained to think we are less capable than we actually are and thus withhold effort. The reason for this is that displays of sophistication, especially in our modern society, tend to make people feel inferior, especially when people are of the attitude that they are incapable and so do nothing.
The child who takes a test thinking "I'm no good at IQ tests" or "I'm stupid" hasn't got a chance in hell of performing well. All kinds of cultural paradigms can feed into that, such as believing that technically minded and intelligent people ("nerds", "geeks", etc..) are unpopular or socially inept. Such a paradigm may encourage a child to withhold effort.
However, our classifications serve a functional-analytic purpose, so it is a dual-purpose phenomena. One to improve our understanding through manipulation of discriminate symbols, and the other to improve our use of symbols for the purposes of manipluation and discrimination.
If we were still using Linnean colour taxonomy we'd still be calling each other "Red Skins" and "Yellow Bellies". But no, we have replaced that outdated and racist taxonomy with something better, regional taxonomy. Now we are split by place of birth, but soon we can develop a new taxonomy based in genetic mutations. Hopefully I'll be part of the "Low-Aggression Variant" group.
I don't think evolutionary psychology is the best tool for explaining these things. Because evolutionary psychology in some way assumes that a trait would not exist if it was not evolutionarily adaptive. The brain of human beings changes throughout life, it adapts at much smaller time-scales than genes do. Evolutionary psychology also assumes we have no other mode than selfish. While I would tend to agree that we are selfish, I don't think it is all we are capable of.
Is humor a selfish act? In some cases it seems so. Humor is often used as a defense mechanism to avoid internalizing criticism. Other times it is used to elevate oneself, by laughing at an inferior. Perhaps our favourite thing to laugh at is human stupidity. There is a modicum (or more) of pride involved in such humor.
The subject of a person's joke often depends on them. That is, humor is subjective. It depends, like Saskia suggests on one's own experiences, sense of self, identities and so forth. We will tend to find more humor in domains that we ourselves excel at, because it is easy for us to look-down at situations within those domains.
As a child we find jokes like this funny: Q: What do you get when you cross a blizzard with a witch? A: A cold spell.
This kind of joke loses its humor as we age, the subject matter shifts to domains we derive our adult identity from (Sex, work, family, etc..)
One of my cousins posts a lot of sexist humor to her facebook wall. Pretty much all of it depicts men as useless invalids and I'm much more disturbed than provoked to laughter. She finds it funny because it strokes her ego.
Just as the children's brains adapted to perform better on these particular tasks, the nutrients (Neurotrophins) that sustain the life of these cells cannot be given to them unless the cells are activated. Over periods of non-use the cells will atrophy and die.
Their performance is bound up in their practice of those tasks as well. A person's IQ score will steadily improve the more they take IQ tests. But that itself doesn't mean they can resolve an IRQ conflict, animate fluid physics in 3D, rebuild a transmission or perform open heart surgery. Those will need their own practice.
See: Hebbian Plasticity, Potentiation
Various factors besides g contribute to IQ scores, some of which are quite pervasive and difficult to control for. Stereotype threat and cultural variations in IQ scores do not accord well with any theory of intelligence. An individual's performance appears more contextual than any intelligence quotient could ever measure. It is like trying to find the position of a subatomic particle.
And when you decontextualize the individual (and the subatomic particle) its behavior becomes sporadic. A child's performance on IQ tests should be considered in light of this and what kind of intrinsic motivators and demotivators are affecting the child's performance. I think, most of us are trained to think we are less capable than we actually are and thus withhold effort. The reason for this is that displays of sophistication, especially in our modern society, tend to make people feel inferior, especially when people are of the attitude that they are incapable and so do nothing.
The child who takes a test thinking "I'm no good at IQ tests" or "I'm stupid" hasn't got a chance in hell of performing well. All kinds of cultural paradigms can feed into that, such as believing that technically minded and intelligent people ("nerds", "geeks", etc..) are unpopular or socially inept. Such a paradigm may encourage a child to withhold effort.