This is interesting, but as has been pointed out, it suffers from some extreme reliance on a rather tenuous analogy between infectious diseases and infectious memes. I think it hard to overstate how dubious and dishonest (either recklessly or negligently) this claim is. Diseases and memes are just not even close to the same thing in an evolutionary sense. There’s no reason to think that mechanisms that have evolved to prevent disease infection would have any effect on meme promulgation. Even if a meme spreads “like malaria,” that doesn’t mean that if you have one-half of the sickle cell gene, you’ll be immune to it. As other commenters have pointed out, the followup to this only gets worse—the kids who signal openness tend to be the kids who are unpopular and thus have no actual cost of signaling such.
But worse, the underlying evolutionary theory behind this seems pretty dubious. Yes, there’s a correlation. That’s only modest evidence. There doesn’t appear to be a clear connection between the openness psychological trait and interacting with outside tribes thousands of years ago, unless such evidence simply wasn’t quoted. Also, the effects of infection would tend to operate on a larger scale than the individual; I don’t know if this theory would require group selection, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it does to some extent. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it seems extremely carefully tailored and post hoc, and so should be at least suspicious. Piling on the dubious analogy makes this whole point pretty poorly supported.
This is interesting, but as has been pointed out, it suffers from some extreme reliance on a rather tenuous analogy between infectious diseases and infectious memes. I think it hard to overstate how dubious and dishonest (either recklessly or negligently) this claim is. Diseases and memes are just not even close to the same thing in an evolutionary sense. There’s no reason to think that mechanisms that have evolved to prevent disease infection would have any effect on meme promulgation. Even if a meme spreads “like malaria,” that doesn’t mean that if you have one-half of the sickle cell gene, you’ll be immune to it. As other commenters have pointed out, the followup to this only gets worse—the kids who signal openness tend to be the kids who are unpopular and thus have no actual cost of signaling such.
But worse, the underlying evolutionary theory behind this seems pretty dubious. Yes, there’s a correlation. That’s only modest evidence. There doesn’t appear to be a clear connection between the openness psychological trait and interacting with outside tribes thousands of years ago, unless such evidence simply wasn’t quoted. Also, the effects of infection would tend to operate on a larger scale than the individual; I don’t know if this theory would require group selection, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it does to some extent. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it seems extremely carefully tailored and post hoc, and so should be at least suspicious. Piling on the dubious analogy makes this whole point pretty poorly supported.