Historians and anthropologists develop neat explanations for horror tropes when genetics has them beat: animals are attracted to and entranced by the punishment and death of abberents. Just read Sapolsky’s Behave and linger in the punishment chapter. Even microbes do this.
SketchySeaBeast 4 hours ago [-]
You don't think that you're being reductive?
Marshferm 3 hours ago [-]
Actually, narrative explanations like the vampire book are exponentially the most reductive. Cause/effect, story. On the other hand, evolution is billions of hours of trial end error making footsteps of niche evasion.
Gotta think big, stories are puny both in terms of explanation load and their total existence in evolutionary time. They are fun over the dinner table but that’s about as definitive as they get.
SketchySeaBeast 3 hours ago [-]
No, I meant your approach to the subject, having found an argument you find compelling and dismissing any others out of hand.
Marshferm 3 hours ago [-]
I’m trained as a media anthropologist who now studies neurobiology as a vector into next-gen AAA game dev (using horror tropes in dystopian sci fi).
SketchySeaBeast 3 hours ago [-]
And out of the entire gamut of literature and competing theories you found a single chapter in a pop sci book to be the most compelling? OK, fair enough.
Marshferm 3 hours ago [-]
Actually to be fair, all of narrative theory and much of anthropology are untestable and unfalsifiable. Which makes them little more than hypotheses. So these tales are little more than the campfire tales that begin our slide into storytelling. Genetics and evolution are testable and falsifiable, giving them scientific, correlational validity. That book is not pop sci at all, it’s written by the leading endocrinologist of our time and has over 2K citations of deep scientific study. Pop sci it is not.
Rendered at 17:04:15 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Gotta think big, stories are puny both in terms of explanation load and their total existence in evolutionary time. They are fun over the dinner table but that’s about as definitive as they get.