Lions love catnip. They will do all the things a house cat does when near it. Eleven million years ago, they shared a common ancestor from which evolution passed down a brain that now contains a menagerie of shared responses and drives. Big or small, cats do what cats do. 1/18
Natural selection tinkered with the felines separately over the years, with different results, otherwise you'd see more people walking pumas in the park. 2/18
Jaguars, leopards, lynx - they all exhibit similar behaviors to the felines who live in apartments: kneading, face rubbing, flopping, purring. The point, again, is behaviors are the output of brains, and brains are built by genes. Share genes, share brains, share behaviors. 3/18
All life on Earth shares DNA. We share 90 percent of our genes with the felines (and around 50 percent of them with bananas). Life is one giant entity taking many forms, each shaped by the pressures faced by its lineage, each manifestation traceable to a common ancestor. 4/18 
The more recent the ancestors, the more behaviors we share, like the way tigers and house cats like to leap in and out of cardboard boxes. Humans and cats are related farther back, so we share simpler things like yawning, blinking, and a deep fascination with laser pointers. 5/18
We share cognition too. Capuchin monkeys can be taught to use tokens to trade for food. Then run into the same financial problems humans do. In the same situations, primate brains share many of the same cognitive biases. 6/18
In a "monkey marketplace," human merchants offer deals for grapes, some risky and some safe, and tiny primates quickly pick up on these factors, changing their behavior in exactly the same way as humans would. Same context, same genes, same response, different species. 7/18
Across many experiments, on paper you can’t tell capuchins and humans apart. It suggests many of our problem-solving behaviors are innate, passed down from a primate ancestor, and not wholly learned via culture or institutions. 8/18 ted.com/talks/laurie_s…
For many of the smart AND dumb things humans do, we aren’t observing human rationality and human behavior, but rationality and behavior common to neural networks, especially the ones built by primate DNA. Introduce money, and primates will do what primates do, big and small. 9/18
So here's the thing: We often think we love cats, Felidae, because of the ridiculous yet predictable things they do, their common quirks, their genus-wide responses and drives. Yet, our love of them is also a common quirk, a shared response, a drive built by primate DNA. 10/18
It took millions of years for amino acids to develop into a species that is born with a compulsion to share love and snuggles with tiny carnivores, and it's as much a part of our evolved, genetic, primate inheritance as bias for confirmation and tendency for partisanship. 11/18
The sciences that study the mind are important because what we discover as common then becomes predictable, and what is predictable can then be defended against, built around, prepared for, mitigated, and when good -- enhanced, encouraged, and shared. 12/18
This is the era of sharing cat videos and disinformation, snuggles and conspiracy theories. We've weaponized and commodified a great deal of our primate inheritance. There is no aspect of human behavior we can't perpetuate, given the motivations and incentives to do so. 13/18
We are still making sense of a bevy of rapidly changing social and behavioral pressures, but I am always optimistic, because we have always done that, and we have always figured it out. But this time, we have science to help us do it better and faster. 14/18
Daniel Innerarity Grau [@daniInnerarity]
wrote "only that which can be measured can be changed." And right now, all across the social sciences, and neurosciences too, every tiny thing that is frustrating you in politics and society is being measured. 15/18
wrote "only that which can be measured can be changed." And right now, all across the social sciences, and neurosciences too, every tiny thing that is frustrating you in politics and society is being measured. 15/18
So if you want to change things, go and learn what they've learned, what they've measured. And if you are one of these scientists, or a science nerd, help explain it, help it get out into the public, into our shared understanding of ourselves. 16/18
As the great James Burke once said, "Recognize within yourself the ability to understand anything, because that ability is there, as long as it is explained clearly enough. And then go and ask for explanations..." 17/18
"...And if you are thinking right now, 'What do I ask for?' Ask yourself if there is anything in your life that you want changed. That's where to start." 18/18
