Keith Henson

Brigham Young had 47 children, and over 50 women as wives.

Anyone who has ever had the feeling of being higher than a kite after giving a public speech is well aware of the effects of attention.

Cults, or related social movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, result in massive military expenses.

If anyone wonders why the airlines are not doing well it is because flying has been made such an unpleasant and degrading experience.

Attention is the way social primates measure status. It is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins.

People can undergo a sudden change of thinking and loyalties under threat of death or intense social pressure and isolation from friends and family.

Even small cults are a serious cost on the world economy, to victims, their families, employers, friends, and credit-card companies.

The rare person is still interested in new advances when they are adults. There is possibly a correlation with intelligence. In any case, you have to be fairly bright to keep learning and changing attitudes as you get older.

As for leadership, I am the kind who leads reluctantly and more by example than anything else. Someone had to be on the incorporation papers as president.

People repeat behaviour that leads to flooding their brains with pleasurable chemicals. The short-term reward loop acts over hours to years, and the long-term reproductive success loop over generations.

Primates will continue to play social games without the least insight into what is killing them.

Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environmen.

Action leads to Attention. that in the short-term releases Rewarding brain chemicals and in the long term improves reproductive success.

I much prefer the modern world.

I can’t think of anyone who is up on evolutionary psychology and related areas who is deluded enough to be called a utopian.

High status males had multiple wives or additional mating opportunities in the ancestral environment.

Successful cult memes induce intense social interaction behaviour between cult members. This trips the attention detectors.

Most of the suicide hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, a place not lacking in wealth. But due to rapid population growth, the wealth per capita has fallen by about half in a generation.

Lie detection is like language; there is a learning window. Telling whoppers to small children seems to be a family tradition in many families.

The drug or cult has major if not exclusive sources of brain rewards.

Cult recruiting methods based on dosing victims with the brain chemicals released during capture bonding would make cults even more of a problem than they are now.

Humans have evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to changes in status.

Some people recovering from drugs or alcohol stay with the programs indefinitely, making the recovery program their family, a long-term source of attention rewards.

The information that is passed from person to person and from generation to generation is the primary factor that gives humans a competitive advantage over other animals.

People under the influence of cults is similar to that we observe in addicts. Typical behaviour for both includes draining bank accounts, neglecting children, destroying relations with family and losing interest in anything except the drug or cult.

Children do not have to learn that streets are dangerous places by potentially fatal trial and error.

Fighting hard to protect yourself and your relatives is good for your genes, but when captured and escape is not possible, giving up short of dying and making the best you can of the new situation is also good for your genes.

Could people be trained to be less gullible? Or are you as stuck with gullibility as you are with skin colour?

I suspect that a substantial fraction of human problems in the world today, not just cults, result from the mismatch between the current environment and the environment in which we evolved.

Genetic studies in Iceland have found that many of the women who were the founding stock of Iceland came from England and what is now France. Some were probably captured and carried off in Viking raids only 40 generations ago.