[HN Gopher] 'Killing the Dead' Review: Watch the Graveyard
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'Killing the Dead' Review: Watch the Graveyard
Author : Thevet
Score : 26 points
Date : 2025-10-23 07:06 UTC (9 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| throwup238 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/rsO3B
| Marshferm wrote:
| Historians and anthropologists develop neat explanations for
| horror tropes when genetics has them beat: animals are attracted
| to and entranced by the punishment and death of abberents. Just
| read Sapolsky's Behave and linger in the punishment chapter. Even
| microbes do this.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| You don't think that you're being reductive?
| Marshferm wrote:
| Actually, narrative explanations like the vampire book are
| exponentially the most reductive. Cause/effect, story. On the
| other hand, evolution is billions of hours of trial end error
| making footsteps of niche evasion.
|
| Gotta think big, stories are puny both in terms of
| explanation load and their total existence in evolutionary
| time. They are fun over the dinner table but that's about as
| definitive as they get.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| No, I meant your approach to the subject, having found an
| argument you find compelling and dismissing any others out
| of hand.
| Marshferm wrote:
| I'm trained as a media anthropologist who now studies
| neurobiology as a vector into next-gen AAA game dev
| (using horror tropes in dystopian sci fi).
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| And out of the entire gamut of literature and competing
| theories you found a single chapter in a pop sci book to
| be the most compelling? OK, fair enough.
| Marshferm wrote:
| Actually to be fair, all of narrative theory and much of
| anthropology are untestable and unfalsifiable. Which
| makes them little more than hypotheses. So these tales
| are little more than the campfire tales that begin our
| slide into storytelling. Genetics and evolution are
| testable and falsifiable, giving them scientific,
| correlational validity. That book is not pop sci at all,
| it's written by the leading endocrinologist of our time
| and has over 2K citations of deep scientific study. Pop
| sci it is not.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > all of narrative theory and much of anthropology are
| untestable and unfalsifiable
|
| Isn't that also true for "Sapolsky's Behave and linger"
| and what you're currently believing? Why does it work
| different for other stories than the one you happen to
| believe in?
| Marshferm wrote:
| Sapolsky isn't storytelling. What I'm restating isn't
| storytelling. It works differently as it's different-
| it's scientific.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| If you're already into neuroanatomy and neurophysiology,
| I recommend looking one step up the emergence chain into
| Ethology too (biology's answer to psychology, across all
| living organisms) . There's still a lot you can do by
| treating the organism as a black box and treating
| behavior empirically; in an evolutionary framework.
| Marshferm wrote:
| I'm more a neo behaviorist, neo Darwinian leading into
| ecological psych and coordination dynamics. The 4E
| approaches make little sense to me. The black box is
| revealed by affordances etc.
| serf wrote:
| >Even microbes do this.
|
| are you anthropomorphizing quorum sensing? If so, that's
| ridiculous. It's an entirely chemical process. You may as well
| start anthropomorphizing the carbonation in soda.
|
| Animal funerary ceremony isn't 'entrancement', it's either
| sequestration for simpler organisms like ants to avoid the
| spread of disease, or in the case of Corvids or other similarly
| intelligent species it seems to be a method of introspection
| and research towards the cause of death to be avoided.
|
| We know this because studies have over-and-over again shown
| that animal cohorts perform worse when the funerary ceremonies
| are disallowed under study.
|
| As for 'Behave', last I read it Sapolsky was _very_ clear that
| the organism and behaviors are a grand tapestry painted by
| biology /society/culture -- not just a singular part of the
| three.
| Marshferm wrote:
| No behave is uniquely indiscreet about maladaptive aspects of
| culture misinterpreting biology. Read again.
|
| Far from anthropomorphising, the biochemical under punishment
| extends seamlessly into culture but remains unconnected to
| our awareness. Our culture is post hoc retrofitted on top of
| neurobiology. Culture explains things wholly disconnected
| from neurobiology, this was experimentally demonstrated by
| Wegener in 2003 and empirically proven in aphasia studies in
| 2016.
|
| In terms of funerals vs murder, this is a distinctly
| different phase, and yes, I would call the affective neuro
| drive to observe funerals an evolutionary entrancement that
| serves some memory-grief cleansing, though this is very
| separate from the punishment murder cycles in discussion. I'd
| read Panksepp's areas about grief loss for explanations of
| ours and Corvid funeral behaviors. What you're describing in
| ants and Corvid's are _functional_ explanations, which are
| the after effects of evolutionary trial and error.
| Functionalist explanations don't explain how the neurons
| achieved this.
|
| I'd read the source citations in aberrant punishment in the
| punishment chapter carefully.
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