Chapter or Hypothesis

Experiment

Chapter Intro 1: What this is about

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Chapter Intro 2: Definitions

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Chapter Two: Adapting to Mankind's Self-created Environment

Hypothesis: Language skill has increase the value of old people to the community "the Grandma Effect".

Experiment: research what has been researched on the Grandma Effect, and add to it.

Experiment: researching more about age-related changes to brain and other organs. Show how these changes are tied to the value of old people helping the human community survive better, particularly as repositories of knowledge.

Hypothesis: Arranged marriage has changed human evolution

Experiment: research how widely spread the custom of arranged marriage is. Research other examples of where a mate (or mate's family) are going to differ in their attractiveness between prospective mate and prospective mate's family.

Hypothesis: assisted childbirth explains why younger women look sexier than older woman.

Experiment: umm... this one is big. I like working on this one as it can explain the roots of the whole fashion industry. And the expression "sex sells". The right expression is "cooperation sells" and sexiness = cooperation. Research if anyone else has taken this approach to sex, child birth and cooperation. Then go from there.

Hypothesis: human males had to become more cooperative for agriculture to succeed.

Experiment: scale the cooperativeness of human males comparing contemporary hunter-gatherer males to contemporary, but long time, agriculturists. Look for signs specifically, that agricultural males can sustain larger group cooperation for longer periods.

Hypothesis: that the Fibbinocci Sequence (full mesh connections) is valid as a predictor of how long it will take to make decisions, in particular novel decisions (decisions about something new and strange).

Experiment: run a series of experiments in which groups have to come to a decision. See how long it takes. My favorite: How long does it take a group of strangers (such as people at a business conference) to decide where to eat lunch?

Hypothesis: that using up too much energy in dominance checking is the limiter on group size for animals with a pecking order social format.

Experiment: show that dominance checking increases dramatically, check the frequency of dominance checking in the real world. Research on when a thriving human social group decides to split in two.

Hypothesis: religion protects from Dark Nihilism

Experiment: can't think of one, off-hand.

Hypothesis: Universal Education is more valuable to Industrialized Man that to Stone Age or Agricultural Man

Experiment: show the cost-benefits of various formal education levels to the three lifestyles.

Hypothesis: more civilization means more ways for humans to cooperate

Experiment: specifically outline the time and resources devoted to various categories of cooperation. Show the benefits received from having more ways to cooperate.

Hypothesis: Industrial Age lifestyle works better when diverse thinking is tolerated. This is not true of Stone Age or Agricultural Age lifestyles.

Experiment: Research through history on diversity issues.

Hypothesis: "Boom" species can evolve into "bust" species, and then go extinct.

Experiment: Research how many species have gone through a "boom-bust-extinct" evolution. Bust in this usage means that when a dominant species gets taken out of the dominant position in the ecosystem by some natural disaster, it can't recover that dominance quickly or inevitably. It, in effect, loses its place in the natural succession.