h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"I think the last country we declared war on was Japan."

Thailand, actually. A month later.

That's a good pub quiz question.

There seemed to be an unreasonable amount of new time spent on football last night.
I wonder though, were all Germans happy? Or just those actually shown watching the match?

I'm sure there were plenty who weren't bothered, just as in other countries. Those who follow the sport have an emotional reaction, those who couldn't care less will be indifferent to the action & outcome.

'If England had won the world cup they would be dancing in the streets of Bradford...'

In that case I'm glad England didn't win. It would cost a fortune to take the family up to Bradford just to dance in the streets for a bit.

<BB<

There was little chance of that.

pretty much every German I know, even those not usually bothered about football, watched the football and they were all very happy today

World Cup final: Riots in Buenos Aires after defeat

Argentine police and radical fans clashed for three hours in Buenos Aires after Argentina's defeat to Germany in the World Cup final.

At least 30 people have been arrested and several police officers were injured.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-28291309

This Mitchell and Webb sketch poses some interesting questions about identifying with particular football teams... and is also very funny....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN1WN0YMWZU

Yeah kind of my point about my B-i-L

People like to be a in a tribe - sense of belonging an and excuse to say yah boo to those in a different one.

It is an amazing thing - I'm really happy to be here right now living among so many happy people, really, they are absolutely ecstatic to have their team win the World Cup for a 4th time.

We just had a pizza party at the office, with a lot of them in their football shirts, watching the team arrive in Berlin with the trophy - it really is nice to see a nation celebrate something good like this.

n 1967, when I was in college in western Massachusetts, the Boston Red Sox [the nearest major league baseball team] won the right to compete n the World Series. There was euphoria on campus. people marched and/or danced in the streets. I did not join them even though I also supported the Red Sox. I just wasn't in any way capable of dancing, and still am not.

There's a tribal aspect to people's allegiances. If some team from your city or country wins some big contest, you feel good for a while, even if you don't even understand the game that the team was playing. Chances are, the players make a lot more than you do, and at least a few of them are worse at their job than you are at yours. There's a book called "Who's on Worst?" about the worst baseball players of all time. Some of the players listed are among the highest-paid thanks to belonging to the New York Yankees, a team which can dominate baseball by throwing money at any problems they have.

Does all this support the theory that Homo saps are hardwired (more or less) for tribalism? Those eons of time after their ancestors jumped down from the trees in a drying East African climate and made their way into the developing broken grasslands landscapes and evolving into hunter gatherer tribal groups ...

Yep, I reckon so, Stone Aart.

There's me and there are all you others.
I'm not much good, long-term, on my own and neither are most of you.
Joining up for, say, hunting and building makes more sense than struggling on alone.

Also, if someone else wants what I've caught or built, it makes sense to have some help.


That's not to say, though, that we were hard-wired this way from the very beginning.... or is it?

We seem to be wired for teamwork, hence the devotion to team sports and social organizations. Along with this, however, is the phenomenon of group dynamics, which seems to almost require that in any group of any size, no matter how close-knit, there are always one or two nonconformists.

Men form gangs, women form cliques.

Men form gangs, women form cliques, Russians form queues and the British form Squares.

Darwin came up with the idea of Natural Selection although the "descent" with modification had been bandied around by many others including I believe his grandfather Erasmus. However Darwin also came up with another idea to explain morphological differences between males and females of the same species - Sexual Selection. This was outlined in his 1871 publication "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex". That is to say evolution is not just by "Natural Selection", it is also by "Sexual Selection".

Now there is in addition other types of "selection" one of which appears to be "Social Selection" and it is "social selection" that is believed to have selected for "intelligence" and "behaviour" - including large aspects of "human behaviour" which would include tribalism.

All of which falls under the same umbrella concept of Natural Selection. They're not separate things.

"That which is most suited to survive, survives."

But sometimes survival is a matter of luck, especially for soldiers in foxholes. Getting shot to death or not has a lot to do with being there when the bullets start flying.