It is also interesting to note, even today, as r-types gain hold in a civilization, they seek to provide the unproductive and uncompetitive with the free resource availability of the r-selected environment. As in nature, as this goes on, the r-type cohort grows in the population, until the entire financial ecosystem collapses, the government dissolves, and the civilization becomes ruthlessly competitive. As in nature, free resource availability cannot go on forever.
To be clear, individuals are complex. Just as it is difficult to characterize a single individual organism’s exact reproductive strategy in nature, it is difficult to characterize a single human’s political strategy. However, just as the quantum mechanical world yields the chaos of its uncertainty to the order and formality of Newtonian physics when viewed from a distance, as we zoom out from our society we will find two primary ideologies within it. Just as in nature, these two ideologies match exactly the two psychologies of the r and K-type psychology.
Before closing, I would like to note that the primary environmental condition favoring an r-strategy is free resource availability. Too often the r-strategy is portrayed as a defensive adaptation designed solely to overcome the mortality of predation, or other forms of environmental harshness, through increased reproductive rates. The r-strategy however, is just as much an offensive adaptation designed to exploit free resource availability, and the absence of competitive selections for survival and reproduction.
In the book, we describe how this may be seen most clearly in the world of microbiology. There, complex, highly-adapted microbes are often drawn from a harsh, highly selective environment, and transferred to an unselective environment of ideal conditions and free resource availability (such as a petri dish of nutrient media housed in an incubator). There, they initially grow slowly, as each parent cell carefully produces colonies full of highly adapted daughter cells.
It is also interesting to note, even today, as r-types gain hold in a civilization, they seek to provide the unproductive and uncompetitive with the free resource availability of the r-selected environment. As in nature, as this goes on, the r-type cohort grows in the population, until the entire financial ecosystem collapses, the government dissolves, and the civilization becomes ruthlessly competitive. As in nature, free resource availability cannot go on forever.
To be clear, individuals are complex. Just as it is difficult to characterize a single individual organism’s exact reproductive strategy in nature, it is difficult to characterize a single human’s political strategy. However, just as the quantum mechanical world yields the chaos of its uncertainty to the order and formality of Newtonian physics when viewed from a distance, as we zoom out from our society we will find two primary ideologies within it. Just as in nature, these two ideologies match exactly the two psychologies of the r and K-type psychology.
Before closing, I would like to note that the primary environmental condition favoring an r-strategy is free resource availability. Too often the r-strategy is portrayed as a defensive adaptation designed solely to overcome the mortality of predation, or other forms of environmental harshness, through increased reproductive rates. The r-strategy however, is just as much an offensive adaptation designed to exploit free resource availability, and the absence of competitive selections for survival and reproduction.
In the book, we describe how this may be seen most clearly in the world of microbiology. There, complex, highly-adapted microbes are often drawn from a harsh, highly selective environment, and transferred to an unselective environment of ideal conditions and free resource availability (such as a petri dish of nutrient media housed in an incubator). There, they initially grow slowly, as each parent cell carefully produces colonies full of highly adapted daughter cells.