Pardon the reference to Shakespeare, but I was trying to come up with a non-contemporary, non-hypothetical, well-known example of the adaptiveness of being an underdog. In Henry V you have a narrative where the king uses consciousness of the numerical inferiority of his troops to assert, i.e., signal, superior valor. In the play, one of his officers surmises that their army is outnumbered by the French by 5 to one; another wishes out loud that another 10,000 could be added to their number. Henry dismisses this talk, declaring: “The fewer men, the greater share of honour. God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.”
Unlike the cave-men who joined Urk’s faction, many of those who didn’t shrink from batle in Henry’s army would NOT have been wiped out. To the contrary, they would have succeeded disproportionately well in evolutionary terms. Might their tribal social emotions go some distance in suggesting why? Stripped of context, odds are merely quantitative, and necessarily leave out important information on qualitative dimensions, such as social emotions. Assume a supporter of Urk gets excited enough over the prospect of sharing the spoils of Zug and reputational rewards that would accrue to him. We might admit that it is not foreordained that Urk would lose the contest. Not only are supporters of the underdog not necessarily wiped out; when they win, as Shakespeare’s Henry intuited, they stand to gain a greater share of the glory, and hence evolutionary fitness.
Pardon the reference to Shakespeare, but I was trying to come up with a non-contemporary, non-hypothetical, well-known example of the adaptiveness of being an underdog. In Henry V you have a narrative where the king uses consciousness of the numerical inferiority of his troops to assert, i.e., signal, superior valor. In the play, one of his officers surmises that their army is outnumbered by the French by 5 to one; another wishes out loud that another 10,000 could be added to their number. Henry dismisses this talk, declaring: “The fewer men, the greater share of honour. God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.”
Unlike the cave-men who joined Urk’s faction, many of those who didn’t shrink from batle in Henry’s army would NOT have been wiped out. To the contrary, they would have succeeded disproportionately well in evolutionary terms. Might their tribal social emotions go some distance in suggesting why? Stripped of context, odds are merely quantitative, and necessarily leave out important information on qualitative dimensions, such as social emotions. Assume a supporter of Urk gets excited enough over the prospect of sharing the spoils of Zug and reputational rewards that would accrue to him. We might admit that it is not foreordained that Urk would lose the contest. Not only are supporters of the underdog not necessarily wiped out; when they win, as Shakespeare’s Henry intuited, they stand to gain a greater share of the glory, and hence evolutionary fitness.