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Richard Hanania's avatar

It seems intuitively correct to you. It seems completely wrong to me and every relationship seems distinct. How do we test it? Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption discusses how people are often very different in and outside the home, which makes sense to me from an evolutionary perspective. It doesn’t make sense we’d have one template that would apply across relationships. Similarities across relationships can more plausibly be explained by the fact that one remains the same person with the same traits.

That this idea sounds plausible to people doesn’t strike me as powerful evidence, since we know that psychobabble can influence them in all kinds of ways.

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Raph Shirley's avatar

I recently read Beyond the Pleasure Principle where Freud discusses the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences. In that essay he famously introduces the death drive and relates it to the evolutionary theory that death was a late evolutionary adaptation. I am trying to understand the possible reasons why death would be evolutionarily adaptive but must admit I am struggling.

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