X-Message-Number: 19948
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2002 22:33:56 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Evolutionary Psychology and the Scarcity of Signups

>From: Keith Henson <>
>Subject: A cryonicist gets published.
>For those interested in the interface between memetics and evolutionary
>psychology, my long worked on article is here:
>http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/cults.pdf
I found this to be a good, thought-provoking article, and it suggested 
another possible cause of the scarcity of people signing up for cryonics: 
they are afraid of losing status by choosing this "weird" thing. This we 
may have known already, yet not fully appreciated. Status, as noted in the 
article, is very important to reproductive success. Thus we may expect that 
nature has lavished special attention over it, so that its significance in 
people's thinking runs deep indeed. In fact I'll conjecture that there are 
psychological mechanisms involved that, in very many cases, are not 
understood (or not fully understood) at the rational level--thus I would 
call them suprarational. Suprarational mechanisms could account for much of 
the strangeness people often express--vacillation, inadequacies, or just 
"don't know"--when trying to explain their lack of interest in cryonics, 
which is steadfast nonetheless. So we may have some insight that could lead 
to better promotional techniques--at least it seems worth looking into.

Mike Perry

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19948