Science Quote by Keith Henson

Status is the invisible thermostat in the human room: tweak it a notch and everyone feels the temperature change. Keith Henson’s line is doing more than nodding at social hierarchy; it’s smuggling in an evolutionary claim about what we’re built to notice, and why so many “rational” choices collapse into tribal theater the moment rank is on the line.

The phrasing matters. “Evolved” relocates status anxiety from personal weakness to adaptive circuitry. It suggests that what looks like vanity or insecurity is often a fast, automatic threat-detection system tuned by ancestral stakes: access to mates, food, protection, coalition support. “Exquisitely sensitive” is almost clinical, but it carries a bite. Exquisite sensitivity is a feature, not a bug - and it implies overreaction. A raised eyebrow, a delayed reply, a subtle interruption can hit the nervous system like a measurable loss, because in small groups those micro-signals were early warnings of exclusion.

The subtext is quietly deflationary toward modern self-conceptions. We like to imagine we argue about facts, shop for preferences, vote for policies. Henson is implying that much of what passes for principle is really status management: signaling competence, guarding face, jockeying for pecking order. It’s also a critique of institutions - workplaces, academia, online platforms - that pretend to reward merit while constantly emitting status cues that hijack attention.

Contextually, this sits in the late-20th/early-21st century evolutionary-psych tradition that treats social emotions as engineered responses. Whether or not you buy every adaptationist leap, the insight lands because it explains the disproportion: why tiny slights can loom larger than material outcomes, and why “respect” so often becomes the real currency behind the stated debate.