The "status" hypothesis simply claims that we associate one another with a one-dimensional quantity: the perceived degree to which others' behavior can affect our well-being. And each of us behaves toward our peers according to our internally represented status mapping.

Imagine that, within your group, you're in a position where everyone wants to please you and no one can afford to challenge you. What does this mean for your behavior? It means you get to act selfish -- focusing on what makes you most pleased, and becoming less sensitive to lower-grade pleasure stimuli.

Now let's say you meet an outsider. They want to estimate your status, because it's a useful and efficient value to remember. And when they see you acting selfishly in front of others in your group, they will infer the lopsided balance of power.

In your own life, when you interact with someone who could affect your well-being, you do your best to act in a way that is valuable to them, hoping they will be motivated to reciprocate. The thing is, if an observer witnesses your unselfish behavior, it's a telltale sign of your lower status. And this scenario is so general, and so common, that most people learn to be very observant of others' deviations from selfishness.

As you know, the Singularity Summit 2009 is on the weekend of Oct 3 - Oct 4. What is it, you ask? I'll start from the beginning...

An interesting collection of molecules occupied a certain tide pool 3.5 to 4.5 billion years ago, interesting because the molecule collection built copies of itself out of surrounding molecules, and the resulting molecule collections also replicated while accumulating beneficial mutations. Those molecule collections satisfied a high-level functional criterion called "genetic fitness", and it happened by pure chance.

If you think about all the possible arrangements of atoms that can occupy a 1-millimeter by 1-millimeter by 1-millimeter cube of space, most of them are going to suck at causing the future universe to contain copies of themselves. Genetic fitness is a vanishingly small target in configuration-space.

And if you studied the universe 5 billion years ago, you would not see a process capable of hitting such a small target. No physical process could create low-entropy collections of atoms satisfying high-level functional criteria. The second law of thermodynamics thus ensured that mice, as well as mousetraps, were physically impossible.