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[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / drafts / friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md

diff --git a/content/drafts/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md b/content/drafts/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md
index f18066a..d6de69f 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md
+++ b/content/drafts/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md
@@ -10,11 +10,13 @@ Like many pre-intelligent creatures, both subspecies of Plain Speech Valley squi
 
 At this, some novice students of historical mammology inquire: why be secretive? Surely if the squirrels were to pool their knowledge together, and build on each other's successes, they could accumulate ever-greater mastery over their environment, and possibly even spark their world's ascension?!
 
-To which it is replied: evolution wouldn't necessarily select for that for that. Survival opportunities tend to be rivalrous: two squirrels can't both eat the same nut, or hide in the same one-squirrel-width hole. Or as it was put in a joke popular amongst the west-valley ground squirrels (according to Harrod's habilitation thesis on pre-intelligence in the days of auld lang syne): I don't need to outrun the _predator_, I just need to outrun my _conspecifics_.
+To which it is replied: evolution wouldn't necessarily select for that. Survival-relevant opportunities are often rivalrous: two squirrels can't both eat the same nut, or hide in the same one-squirrel-width hole. Or as it was put in a joke popular amongst the west-valley ground squirrels (according to Harrod's post-habilitation thesis on pre-intelligence in the days of auld lang syne): I don't need to outrun the _predator_, I just need to outrun my _conspecifics_. Thus, secrecy instincts turned out to be adaptive: a squirrel keeping a valuable secret to itself and its friends would gain more inclusive fitness than a squirrel who shared its knowledge freely with anysquirrel who could listen.
+
+A few students inquire further: but that's a _contingent_ fact about the distribution of squirrel-survival-relevant opportunities in the Valley of of Plain Speech in days of auld lang syne, right? A different distribution of adaptive problems might induce a less secretive psychology?
+
+To which it is replied: yes, well, there's a reason the ascension of Earth-that-was would be sparked by the _H. sapiens_ line of hominids some millions of years later, rather than by the Plain Speech species 9792 and 9794.
 
-[...]
 
-(well, there's a reason the ascension of Earth-that-was would be sparked by the _H. sapiens_ line of hominids some millions of years later, rather than by the Plain Speech species 9792 and 9794.)
 
 [TODO: novelty instincts about secrets make cross-species friends more desirable, but species differences also make them frustrating]