Humans are smart. Well, maybe we used to be. I say humans used to be smart because many thousands of years ago (over many thousands of years), we switched environmental niches. We used to exist as mid-level forages, but now we control the food web. What's funny, is that at first, we were not very good at mid-level foraging. Some researchers think that we may have been down to about 10,000 prehistoric humans before we were forced to update our survival tactics. These new tactics had to do with our ability to work together. If we had not tried trusting each other and learned to exist as cohesive groups, our species probably would have not made the evolutionary cut. Yet there is a small subset of modern humans who I think still act pretty smart: people who join fandoms. This may seem counter-intuitive since fans as individuals can have such a bad rep... but I think paying attention to how fans follow can tell us a lot about proper human behavior. For about a ye...
Explaining fandom from an evolutionary point of view.