Inborn PreWired Logic Module
Immortalist
result of having just one tool that is applied to all problems.
Instead, it is a bundle of tools, each well-designed for solving a
different problem – scissors for cutting paper, corkscrew for opening
wine, toothpick for cleaning teeth. Each solves a different problem
well, thereby providing flexible problem solving ability. Similarly,
the human mind does not have just one blunt tool for solving all
problems – and if it did, we would be very limited indeed. Each human
mind contains a large number of programs, each well-designed for
solving a different adaptive problem: choosing a good mate, caring for
children, foraging for food, avoiding predators, navigating a
landscape, forming coalitions, trading, defending one’s family against
aggression, and so on. We are flexible problem solvers in part because
our minds contain so many well-engineered tools."
- - Leda Cosmides
http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/ledainterview.htm
The mind is composed of a large number of mental modules each designed
to solve a specific problem. For example, there is one mechanism for
perceiving three dimensions, another for anger, another for falling in
love. The mind is like a Swiss Army knife; i.e., it has lots of
specialized tools. There is no such thing as general intelligence,
general learning, or any other general ability to solve problems.
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/463evolpsyIQ.html
...Rather than regarding the mind at birth as a content-free, blank
slate on which are inscribed the skills and values of the culture of
an individual, evolutionary psychology posits the existence of innate
interests, capacities, and tastes, laid down through processes of
natural and sexual selection. Evolutionary psychology replaces the
blank slate as a metaphor for mind with the Swiss army knife: the mind
is a set of tools and capacities specifically adapted to important
tasks and interests.
These acquisitions are adaptations to life in the small hunter-
gatherer bands in which our ancestors lived for 100,000 generations
before civilization as we now understand it began. They include a long
list of universal features of the Stone Age, hunter-gatherer mind: for
example language use according to syntactic rules; kinship systems
with incest avoidance; phobias, e.g. fear of snakes and spiders; child-
nurturing interests; nepotism, the favouring of blood relations; a
sense of justice, fairness, and obligations associated with emotions
of anger and revenge; the capacity to make and use hand tools; status
and rank ordering in human relations; a sense of food purity and
contamination; and so forth (Pinker 1997).
Some of these features are uniform across the human species; others
are statistically related to sex; for instance, females are more
inclined towards an interest in child nurturing and have a greater
ability to remember details in visual experience, while males are more
physically aggressive, and better able to determine directionality and
engage in “map reading.”
http://www.denisdutton.com/aesthetics_&_evolutionary_psychology.htm
http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_05/d_05_p/d_05_p_her/d_05_p_her.html
http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n01_here_to_stay.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular
Immortalist
opposite sex. Everywhere some potential mates are preferred, others
shunned. Our sexual desires have come into being in the same way as
have other kinds of desires.
Consider the survival
problem of what
food to eat.
Humans are faced with a bewildering array of potential objects to
ingest—berries, fruit, nuts, meat, dirt, gravel, poisonous plants,
twigs, and trees. If we had no taste preferences and ingested objects
from our environment at random, some people, by chance alone, would
consume ripe fruit, fresh nuts, and other objects that provide caloric
and nutritive sustenance. Others, also by chance alone, would eat
rancid meat, rotten fruit, and toxins. Earlier humans who preferred
nutritious objects survived.
Our actual food preferences bear out this evolutionary process. We
show great fondness for substances rich in fat, sugar, protein, and
salt and an aversion to substances that are bitter, sour, and toxic.
These food preferences solve a basic problem of survival. We carry
them with us today precisely because they solved critical adaptive
problems for our ancestors.
Our desires in a mate serve analogous adaptive purposes...
...Although ancestral selection pressures are responsible for creating
the mating strategies we use today, our current conditions differ from
the historical conditions under which those strategies evolved.
Ancestral people got their vegetables from gathering and their meat
from hunting, whereas modern people get their food from supermarkets
and restaurants.
Similarly, modern urban people today deploy their mating strategies in
singles bars, at parties, through computer networks, and by means of
dating services rather than on the savanna, in protected caves, or
around primitive campfires.
Whereas modern conditions of mating differ from ancestral conditions,
the same sexual strategies operate with unbridled force. Our evolved
psychology of mating remains. It is the only mating psychology we
have; it just gets played out in a modern environment.
To illustrate, look at the foods consumed in massive quantities at
fast food chains. We have not evolved any genes for McDonalds, but the
foods we eat there reveal the ancestral strategies for survival we
carry with us today. We consume in vast quantities fat, sugar,
protein, and salt in the form of burgers, shakes, french fries, and
pizzas. Fast food chains are popular precisely because they serve
these elements in concentrated quantities. They reveal the food
preferences that evolved in a past environment of scarcity. Today,
however, we overconsume these elements because of their evolutionarily
unprecedented abundance, and the old survival strategies now hurt our
health. We are stuck with the taste preferences that evolved under
different conditions, because evolution works on a time scale too slow
to keep up with the radical changes of the past several hundred years.
Although we cannot go back in time and observe directly what those
ancestral conditions were, our current taste preferences, like our
fear of snakes and our fondness for children, provide a window for
viewing what those conditions must have been. We carry with us
equipment that was designed for an ancient world.
Our evolved mating strategies, just like our survival strategies, may
be currently maladaptive in the currencies of survival and
reproduction. The advent of AIDS, for example, renders casual sex far
more dangerous to survival than it ever was under ancestral
conditions...
The Evolution of Desire:
Strategies of Human Mating
by David M. Buss
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465021433/
Immortalist
not more than a few days old. They were contained in a circular pen,
about 20 feet in diameter, with the walls not more than a foot in
height. At the center of this circular pen, was a vertical pole 3
meters in height, with a horizontal arm extending out from the top of
the central pole so that the arm could sweep horizontally over the pen
in a rotary motion. Then a wooden cross was attached to the end of the
arm.
1. The little chicks were peacefully feeding in the pen. When the arm
with the cross would slowly move in one_direction, the little chicks
would run for cover.
2. When the same_cross would move in the opposite direction, the birds
would ignore it.
If the cross moved in the direction of its longer arm, the little
chicks, completely undisturbed, would go on pecking at their food. If
the cross would move in the direction of it's shorter arm, they would
immediately scream with fright and run for cover in a hutch in the
center of the pen.
Therefore Tinbergen (1951) showed that;
1. When young turkeys see a silhouette model pulled in the direction
that makes it look like a hawk, they were terrified and ran for
cover.
2. However, when it was pulled in the other direction, which makes it
look like a goose, they were nonchalant (i.e., didn't react).
Inborn in those little chicks' brain was the instinctive recognition
of the hawk as its natural enemy, instinctive fear and instinctive
reaction to flee and take cover. Without any training, without any
conscious thought processes, a few days old chicks were able to
recognize a clear and present danger - the hawk - even though it was
only a silhouette model of their enemy passing over their heads.
http://www.world-mysteries.com/hvd_sexdrive_1.htm
http://www.google.com/searchq=tinbergen+hawk+goose+direction+of+movement
Immortalist
[1] - Error Management Theory
[2] - The Probability Instinct
[3] - Pascal's Wager
[4] - Over-Sensitive Agency-Detectors
##################################
[1] - Error Management Theory
##################################
A new theory of cognitive biases, called error management theory
(EMT), proposes that psychological mechanisms are designed to be
predictably biased when the costs of false-positive and false-negative
errors were asymmetrical over evolutionary history. This theory
explains known phenomena such as men's overperception of women's
sexual intent, and it predicts new biases in social inference such as
women's underestimation of men's commitment.
For example in an uncertain world, consider two potential errors in
thinking:
Partner is having an affair (but isn't)
Partner isn't having an affair (but is)
The cost of making those two errors are very different. Those making
the first error have less cost (from a reproductive success
standpoint) than those who make the second. Theoretically we evolved
toward vigilance and are more likely to make [adaptive_error.]
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2002/pr020103.cfm
Humans live in an uncertain world. We rely on our senses to pick up
information from the world, and then use our information processing
capacities to make inferences about the true state of the world. Real
threats to our survival and relationships are not always readily
apparent, given the ambiguity and uncertainty of the information.
Consider a relatively simple problem of walking through the woods and
fleetingly sensing a slithering object scurry underneath some leaves
in the path directly in front of you. There are two possible states of
reality: either there is a dangerous snake in your path or there is
not a dangerous snake in your path. Given the incomplete and uncertain
information that you have percieved, there are also two inferences you
could make. There is indeed a dangerous snake, and you act to avoid
it. Or you could conclude that there is no snake and continue walking
down the path.
There are also two possible ways that you could be wrong. You could
believe that there is a snake when in fact no snake exists. Or you
could believe that no snake when in fact a venomous rattler is lurking
right in your path. The costs of these two types of errors, however,
are vastly different. In the first case, your belief causes you to
incur the trivial metabolic cost of taking an unnecessary evasive
action. By giving a wide birth to the area that you believe harbors a
snake, you have merely gone out of your way a little, incurring a
minor delay in your walk. In the second case, however, failing to
detect a snake that is in fact lurking in your path can cost you your
life. The two ways of being wrong carry substantially different costs.
Now imagine that this scenario not only repeats itself thousands and
thousands of times in your liftime, but billions and billions of times
over human evolutionary history. Those who made the first kind of
mistake tended to survive, whereas those who made the second kind of
mistake tended to die. As a result, modern humans have descended from
a line of ancestors whose inferences about the uncertain world erred
in the direction of believing that snakes existed more than they do.
These can be called adaptive errors.
The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is As
Necessary As Love and Sex - by David M. Buss
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684850818/
##################################
[2] - The Probability Instinct
##################################
It looks as if Kant, who thought our minds structure our perceptions,
was right. Probability was built into our minds. Our minds, the
electrochemical symphony that our narrowly evolved neural ganglia
play, impose an infrastructure on our thinking. The mind imposes a
background of time and space and causal connectedness. Scientists have
never seen a "causality" in the wild. They have seen, and they
predict, only space-time events that follow space-time events. Apples
on the tree, then apples in the air, then apples on the ground.
Equations and correlations have replaced causes, just as science has
largely replaced philosophy and religion as a theory of things. No
causal germ in one event unfolds into another event. But the mind, as
eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume observed, makes it seem so
and inserts the causal links in the event chain.
Probability seems to be part of the same mental infrastructure. It
forms part of our mental background or viewing screen along with time
and space and causality and similarity and the topological notions of
continuity and connectedness. We see probability everywhere because it
lies in our glasses.
I believe that probability or "randomness" is a psychic instinct or
Jungian archetype or mental trend that helps us organize our
perceptions and memories and most of all our expectations. Probability
gives structure to our competing causal predictions about how the
future will unfold in the next instant or day or season or millennium.
Probability ranks or weights the future alternatives. Our expectations
then blend or average these future alternatives into a single
probability-weighted average. The probability weights do not exist
outside our minds. They have no physical reality but have a powerful
psychological reality rooted in our neural mi-crostructure. Hume also
thought that we make up probability as we go and use it to fill in
gaps in our mind schemes or world views: "Though there be no such
thing as chance in the world, our ignorance of the real cause of any
event has the same influence on the understanding and begets a like
species of belief."
This probability instinct seems to cut across cultures and may cut
across species. Besides the probability-laden psychology of scientists
and most nonscientists, the widespread gambling and games of chance in
primitive and modern cultures suggest that probability "reasoning" may
be a cultural constant like hero worship or fertility rituals or
incest and adultery taboos. A cultural constant suggests a biological
substrate, and that requires an evolutionary history.
Ranking future alternatives can help pass on genes. Those who could so
rank may have eaten those who could not. It allows us to bet before we
act and improve the outcome of acting. That forward-looking ability
has supreme survival value in biological evolution, the genetic
variation and selection in the last few million years that has finely
sculpted our brains and minds, and in the prior evolution that
sculpted the brains and minds of our mammalian ancestors in the last
220 million years. Natural selection filters out organisms as they
cross the fuzzy line from the present to the future. Natural selection
favors brain mechanisms that help an organism make its next move in a
changing and dangerous world. These forward-looking brain mechanisms
may run deep in the structure of mammalian and even reptilian brains.
Future studies may find that the brains of chimps and apes and lesser-
brained mammals house a forward-looking probability instinct. At the
other extreme we should not be surprised that scientists have exalted
probability ranking into their grand organizing principle of maximum
probability. Scientists follow their probability instincts as their
hominid forefathers followed theirs. Scientists just know more math.
Fuzzy Thinking - The New Science of Fuzzy Logic
Bart Kosko
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/078688021X/
##################################
[3] - Pascal's Wager
##################################
"Pascal's Wager" posits that it is a better "bet" to believe that God
exists than not to believe, because the expected value of believing
(which Pascal assessed as infinite) is always greater than the
expected value of not believing. ...even under the assumption that
God’s existence is unlikely, the potential benefits of believing are
so vast as to make betting on theism rational....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager
http://www.iep.utm.edu/p/pasc-wag.htm
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/
##################################
[4] - Over-Sensitive Agency-Detectors
##################################
Humans routinely attribute intentions, beliefs, and desires in order
to interpret the behavior of others. Other humans are seen as agents,
that is, as entities that pursue goals in accordance with their
beliefs and desires. Attributions of agency are so ubiquitous that
they are typically taken for granted in everyday life. These
attributions are not always correct in identifying the beliefs and
desires that underlie a specific action of an agent; yet, if people
did not see others as agents, the capacity to understand their
behavior would be severely impaired. For example, people would be
surprised when others got up and moved. Abundant research documents
children's acquisition of human agent concepts over the first several
years of life (Astington et al., 1988; Perner, 1993; Wellman, 1990),
but there is little work available on the development of non-human
agent concepts. Yet, people often attribute intentions, beliefs and
desires to animals as well as to ghosts, gods, demons, and monsters.
...Why are we humans predisposed to have only these kinds of religious
concepts? Boyer’s answer, in brief, is that our brains have been
"designed by evolution" to employ particular cognitive systems that
help us to make sense of "particular aspects of objects around us and
produce specific kinds of [inferences] about them."
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0201/reviews/griffiths.html
Evolutionary Reasons For Humans To Be "Over-Sensitive Agency-
Detectors"
Now, an agent is just some entity that is moved or guided by its own
awareness and goals; for humans, other human beings are among the most
important agents in our environments, but there are also the various
non-human animals. Given that the presence of other agents (and what
they are doing) matters to our prospects for survival and
reproduction, why would we be over-sensitive to their presence?
Consider predators. 'Detecting' a predator that is not there is not a
terribly bad thing; failing to detect a predator that is there is much
more serious. And something very similar goes for prey: Detecting
lunch that isn't there is much less serious than failing to detect
lunch when it is there. In both direction, our capacities for agency
detection should be tuned to generate more false positives than false
negatives. For evolutionary reasons, we should expect to 'detect' some
agents which are not there. Is the perception of (accidental) patterns
of cues in our environment at the root of the detection of
supernatural agents, of gods? That cannot be the whole story, for
there would be no general evolutionary pay-off for over-sensitive
agency detection unless we could rapidly drop mistaken conclusions
about the presence of predators or prey as new evidence comes in. (You
can starve while looking for the lunch that is not there or while
cowering in hiding from the predator that is not there.) Even if
initial detection of supernatural agents is a function of over-
sensitive agency detection routines, something else is needed to
explain what stabilizes belief in such agents.
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary
Origins of Religious Thought - Pascal Boyer
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465006965/
http://personal.bgsu.edu/~roberth/log2002.html
Rod Speed
> "The Swiss Army knife is a flexible tool. Its flexibility is not the
> result of having just one tool that is applied to all problems.
> Instead, it is a bundle of tools, each well-designed for solving a
> different problem � scissors for cutting paper, corkscrew for opening
> wine, toothpick for cleaning teeth. Each solves a different problem
> well, thereby providing flexible problem solving ability. Similarly,
> the human mind does not have just one blunt tool for solving all
> problems � and if it did, we would be very limited indeed.
> Each human mind contains a large number of programs,
Nope, it behaves in a variety of different ways.
> each well-designed for solving a different adaptive problem:
That well designed claim is very arguable indeed.
> choosing a good mate,
Very very arguable given the divorce rate.
> caring for children,
Very arguable too.
> foraging for food,
We dont bother to do that anymore and most arent that good at that if it become necessary.
> avoiding predators,
We dont do that much at all anymore and most do that very badly if it ever becomes necessary.
> navigating a landscape,
Most dont actually do that very well at all.
> forming coalitions, trading, defending one�s family against aggression,
We dont do that much at all anymore either and most do that very badly if it ever becomes necessary.
> and so on. We are flexible problem solvers in part because
> our minds contain so many well-engineered tools."
Plenty of us arent.
> - - Leda Cosmides
> http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/ledainterview.htm
> The mind is composed of a large number of mental modules
> each designed to solve a specific problem. For example,
> there is one mechanism for perceiving three dimensions,
> another for anger, another for falling in love.
You aint established that they are separate.
> The mind is like a Swiss Army knife;
Nothing like, actually.
> i.e., it has lots of specialized tools.
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> There is no such thing as general intelligence, general
> learning, or any other general ability to solve problems.
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/463evolpsyIQ.html
> ...Rather than regarding the mind at birth as a content-free, blank
> slate on which are inscribed the skills and values of the culture of
> an individual, evolutionary psychology posits the existence of innate
> interests, capacities, and tastes, laid down through processes of
> natural and sexual selection. Evolutionary psychology replaces the
> blank slate as a metaphor for mind with the Swiss army knife: the
> mind is a set of tools and capacities specifically adapted to
> important tasks and interests.
Easy to claim that last. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> These acquisitions are adaptations to life in the small hunter-
> gatherer bands in which our ancestors lived for 100,000
> generations before civilization as we now understand it began.
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> They include a long list of universal features of the Stone Age,
> hunter-gatherer mind: for example language use according to syntactic rules;
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> kinship systems with incest avoidance;
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> phobias, e.g. fear of snakes and spiders;
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> child- nurturing interests; nepotism, the favouring of blood
> relations; a sense of justice, fairness, and obligations associated
> with emotions of anger and revenge; the capacity to make and
> use hand tools; status and rank ordering in human relations; a
> sense of food purity and contamination; and so forth (Pinker 1997).
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
Ed
> "The Swiss Army knife is a flexible tool. Its flexibility is not the
> result of having just one tool that is applied to all problems.
> Instead, it is a bundle of tools, each well-designed for solving a
> different problem – scissors for cutting paper, corkscrew for opening
> wine, toothpick for cleaning teeth. Each solves a different problem
> well, thereby providing flexible problem solving ability. Similarly,
> the human mind does not have just one blunt tool for solving all
> problems – and if it did, we would be very limited indeed. Each human
> mind contains a large number of programs, each well-designed for
> solving a different adaptive problem: choosing a good mate, caring for
> children, foraging for food, avoiding predators, navigating a
> landscape, forming coalitions, trading, defending one’s family against
> aggression, and so on. We are flexible problem solvers in part because
> our minds contain so many well-engineered tools."
>
If Chomski et al are to be believed, we have a language module too.
Presumably its rules influence what we talk about and what we
understand. It evolved to let us pick and woo mates and the ones with
the best blarney did best in the reproduction race.
Rod Speed
> ...Nowhere do people have an equal desire for all members of the
> opposite sex. Everywhere some potential mates are preferred, others
> shunned. Our sexual desires have come into being in the same way as
> have other kinds of desires.
> Consider the survival problem of what food to eat.
> Humans are faced with a bewildering array of potential objects to
> ingest�berries, fruit, nuts, meat, dirt, gravel, poisonous plants,
> twigs, and trees. If we had no taste preferences and ingested objects
> from our environment at random, some people, by chance alone, would
> consume ripe fruit, fresh nuts, and other objects that provide caloric
> and nutritive sustenance. Others, also by chance alone, would eat
> rancid meat, rotten fruit, and toxins.
> Earlier humans who preferred nutritious objects survived.
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> Our actual food preferences bear out this evolutionary process.
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> We show great fondness for substances rich in fat, sugar, protein,
> and salt and an aversion to substances that are bitter, sour, and toxic.
Doesnt explain why some develop a taste for the bitter and sour etc.
> These food preferences solve a basic problem of survival.
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> We carry them with us today precisely because they
> solved critical adaptive problems for our ancestors.
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
Particularly with some of the more exotic stuff
that humans choose to eat and do fine when eating.
> Our desires in a mate serve analogous adaptive purposes...
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> ...Although ancestral selection pressures are responsible
> for creating the mating strategies we use today,
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> our current conditions differ from the historical
> conditions under which those strategies evolved.
You quite sure you aint one of those rocket scientist wankers ?
> Ancestral people got their vegetables from gathering and
> their meat from hunting, whereas modern people get their
> food from supermarkets and restaurants.
You quite sure you aint one of those rocket scientist wankers ?
> Similarly, modern urban people today deploy their mating
> strategies in singles bars, at parties, through computer
> networks, and by means of dating services
And most of them dont get their mates using any of those approaches.
> rather than on the savanna, in protected caves, or around primitive campfires.
You quite sure you aint one of those rocket scientist wankers ?
> Whereas modern conditions of mating differ from ancestral conditions,
> the same sexual strategies operate with unbridled force.
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> Our evolved psychology of mating remains.
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> It is the only mating psychology we have;
Wrong, as always.
> it just gets played out in a modern environment.
> To illustrate, look at the foods consumed in massive quantities
> at fast food chains. We have not evolved any genes for
> McDonalds, but the foods we eat there reveal the
> ancestral strategies for survival we carry with us today.
Pity about the other food that flouts your previous stupid claim.
> We consume in vast quantities fat, sugar, protein, and
> salt in the form of burgers, shakes, french fries, and pizzas.
Hordes of us arent that stupid.
> Fast food chains are popular precisely because
> they serve these elements in concentrated quantities.
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> They reveal the food preferences that evolved in a past environment of scarcity.
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> Today, however, we overconsume these elements because of their evolutionarily
> unprecedented abundance, and the old survival strategies now hurt our health.
Only with the fools that shovel far more into their stupid mouths than they need.
> We are stuck with the taste preferences that evolved under different conditions,
We clearly arent with some stuff like deliberately bitter food etc.
> because evolution works on a time scale too slow to keep up
> with the radical changes of the past several hundred years.
Dont need to evolve to avoid shoveling far more of that shit into your mouth than you need.
> Although we cannot go back in time and observe directly what
> those ancestral conditions were, our current taste preferences,
> like our fear of snakes and our fondness for children, provide a
> window for viewing what those conditions must have been.
Like hell they do with some food we choose to eat now.
> We carry with us equipment that was designed for an ancient world.
And we also have a brain that means we dont try to rape anyone we come across etc, fool.
> Our evolved mating strategies, just like our survival strategies, may
> be currently maladaptive in the currencies of survival and reproduction.
And it may not too.
> The advent of AIDS, for example, renders casual sex far more
> dangerous to survival than it ever was under ancestral conditions...
> The Evolution of Desire:
> Strategies of Human Mating
> by David M. Buss
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465021433/
Just another completely mindless steaming turd.
Immortalista
Steven Pinker: EXCERPT
The blank slate, the noble
savage, and the ghost
in the machine
Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the
behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what
makes people tick. A tacit theory of human nature-that behavior is
caused by thoughts and feelings-is embedded in the very way we think
about people. We fill out this theory by introspecting on our own
minds and assuming that our fellows are like ourselves, and by
watching people's behavior and filing away generalizations. We absorb
still other ideas from our intellectual climate: from the expertise of
authorities and the conventional wisdom of the day.
Our theory of human nature is the wellspring of much in our lives. We
consult it when we want to persuade or threaten, inform or deceive. It
advises us on how to nurture our marriages, bring up our children, and
control our own behavior. Its assumptions about learning drive our
educational policy; its assumptions about motivation drive our
policies on economics, law, and crime. And because it delineates what
people can achieve easily, what they can achieve only with sacrifice
or pain, and what they cannot achieve at all, it affects our values:
what we believe we can reasonably strive for as individuals and as a
society. Rival theories of human nature are entwined in different ways
of life and different political systems, and have been a source of
much conflict over the course of history.
For millennia, the major theories of human nature have come from
religion. The Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, offers
explanations for much of the subject matter now studied by biology and
psychology. Humans are made in the image of God and are unrelated to
animals. Women are derivative of men and destined to be ruled by them.
The mind is an immaterial substance: it has powers possessed by no
purely physical structure, and can continue to exist when the body
dies.4 The mind is made up of several components, including a moral
sense, an ability to love, a capacity for reason that recognizes
whether an act conforms to ideals of goodness, and a decision faculty
that chooses how to behave. Although the decision faculty is not bound
by the laws of cause and effect, it has an innate tendency to choose
sin. Our cognitive and perceptual faculties work accurately because
God implanted ideals in them that correspond to reality and because he
coordinates their functioning with the outside world. Mental health
comes from recognizing God's purpose, choosing good and repenting sin,
and loving God and one's fellow humans for God's sake.
The Judeo-Christian theory is based on events narrated in the Bible.
We know that the human mind has nothing in common with the minds of
animals because the Bible says that humans were created separately. We
know that the design of women is based on the design of men because in
the second telling of the creation of women Eve was fashioned from the
rib of Adam. Human decisions cannot be the inevitable effects of some
cause, we may surmise, because God held Adam and Eve responsible for
eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, implying that they could
have chosen otherwise. Women are dominated by men as punishment for
Eve's disobedience, and men and women inherit the sinfulness of the
first couple.
The Judeo-Christian conception is still the most popular theory of
human nature in the United States. According to recent polls, 76
percent of Americans believe in the biblical account of creation, 79
percent believe that the miracles in the Bible actually took place, 76
percent believe in angels, the devil, and other immaterial souls, 67
percent believe they will exist in some form after their death, and
only 15 percent believe that Darwin's theory of evolution is the best
explanation for the origin of human life on Earth.5 Politicians on the
right embrace the religious theory explicitly, and no mainstream
politician would dare contradict it in public. But the modern sciences
of cosmology, geology, biology, and archaeology have made it
impossible for a scientifically literate person to believe that the
biblical story of creation actually took place. As a result, the Judeo-
Christian theory of human nature is no longer explicitly avowed by
most academics, journalists, social analysts, and other intellectually
engaged people. Nonetheless, every society must operate with a theory
of human nature, and our intellectual mainstream is committed to
another one. The theory is seldom articulated or overtly embraced, but
it lies at the heart of a vast number of beliefs and policies.
Bertrand Russell wrote, "Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed
by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies
on a summer day." For intellectuals today, many of those convictions
are about psychology and social relations. I will refer to those
convictions as the Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no
inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or
ourselves.
That theory of human nature-namely, that it barely exists-is the topic
of this book. Just as religions contain a theory of human nature, so
theories of human nature take on some of the functions of religion,
and the Blank Slate has become the secular religion of modern
intellectual life. It is seen as a source of values, so the fact that
it is based on a miracle-a complex mind arising out of nothing-is not
held against it. Challenges to the doctrine from skeptics and
scientists have plunged some believers into a crisis of faith and have
led others to mount the kinds of bitter attacks ordinarily aimed at
heretics and infidels. And just as many religious traditions
eventually reconciled themselves to apparent threats from science
(such as the revolutions of Copernicus and Darwin), so, I argue, will
our values survive the demise of the Blank Slate.
The chapters in this part of the book (Part I) are about the
ascendance of the Blank Slate in modern intellectual life, and about
the new view of human nature and culture that is beginning to
challenge it. In succeeding parts we will witness the anxiety evoked
by this challenge (Part II) and see how the anxiety may be assuaged
(Part III). Then I will show how a richer conception of human nature
can provide insight into language, thought, social life, and morality
(Part IV) and how it can clarify controversies on politics, violence,
gender, childrearing, and the arts (Part V). Finally I will show how
the passing of the Blank Slate is less disquieting, and in some ways
less revolutionary, than it first appears (Part VI).
Chapter 1
The Official Theory
"Blank slate" is a loose translation of the medieval Latin term tabula
rasa-literally, "scraped tablet." It is commonly attributed to the
philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), though in fact he used a different
metaphor. Here is the famous passage from An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding:
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all
characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence
comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man
has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all
the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word,
from experience.
Locke was taking aim at theories of innate ideas in which people were
thought to be born with mathematical ideals, eternal truths, and a
notion of God. His alternative theory, empiricism, was intended both
as a theory of psychology-how the mind works-and as a theory of
epistemology-how we come to know the truth. Both goals helped motivate
his political philosophy, often honored as the foundation of liberal
democracy. Locke opposed dogmatic justifications for the political
status quo, such as the authority of the church and the divine right
of kings, which had been touted as self-evident truths. He argued that
social arrangements should be reasoned out from scratch and agreed
upon by mutual consent, based on knowledge that any person could
acquire. Since ideas are grounded in experience, which varies from
person to person, differences of opinion arise not because one mind is
equipped to grasp the truth and another is defective, but because the
two minds have had different histories. Those differences therefore
ought to be tolerated rather than suppressed. Locke's notion of a
blank slate also undermined a hereditary royalty and aristocracy,
whose members could claim no innate wisdom or merit if their minds had
started out as blank as everyone else's. It also spoke against the
institution of slavery, because slaves could no longer be thought of
as innately inferior or subservient.
During the past century the doctrine of the Blank Slate has set the
agenda for much of the social sciences and humanities. As we shall
see, psychology has sought to explain all thought, feeling, and
behavior with a few simple mechanisms of learning. The social sciences
have sought to explain all customs and social arrangements as a
product of the socialization of children by the surrounding culture: a
system of words, images, stereotypes, role models, and contingencies
of reward and punishment. A long and growing list of concepts that
would seem natural to the human way of thinking (emotions, kinship,
the sexes, illness, nature, the world) are now said to have been
"invented" or "socially constructed."2 The Blank Slate has also served
as a sacred scripture for political and ethical beliefs. According to
the doctrine, any differences we see among races, ethnic groups,
sexes, and individuals come not from differences in their innate
constitution but from differences in their experiences. Change the
experiences-by reforming parenting, education, the media, and social
rewards-and you can change the person. Underachievement, poverty, and
antisocial behavior can be ameliorated; indeed, it is irresponsible
not to do so. And discrimination on the basis of purportedly inborn
traits of a sex or ethnic group is simply irrational.
The Blank Slate is often accompanied by two other doctrines, which
have also attained a sacred status in modern intellectual life. My
label for the first of the two is commonly attributed to the
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), though it really comes
from John Dryden's The Conquest of Granada, published in 1670:
I am as free as Nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began
, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
The concept of the noble savage was inspired by European colonists'
discovery of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and (later)
Oceania. It captures the belief that humans in their natural state are
selfless, peaceable, and untroubled, and that blights such as greed,
anxiety, and violence are the products of civilization. In 1755
Rousseau wrote:
So many authors have hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel,
and requires a regular system of police to be reclaimed; whereas
nothing can be more gentle than him in his primitive state, when
placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and
the pernicious good sense of civilized man. . . .
The more we reflect on this state, the more convinced we shall be that
it was the least subject of any to revolutions, the best for man, and
that nothing could have drawn him out of it but some fatal accident,
which, for the public good, should never have happened. The example of
the savages, most of whom have been found in this condition, seems to
confirm that mankind was formed ever to remain in it, that this
condition is the real youth of the world, and that all ulterior
improvements have been so many steps, in appearance towards the
perfection of individuals, but in fact towards the decrepitness of the
species.
First among the authors that Rousseau had in mind was Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679), who had presented a very different picture:
Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common
power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is
called war; and such a war as is of every man against every
man. . . .
In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit
thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no
navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no
commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things
as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no
account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst
of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of
man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Hobbes believed that people could escape this hellish existence only
by surrendering their autonomy to a sovereign person or assembly. He
called it a leviathan, the Hebrew word for a monstrous sea creature
subdued by Yahweh at the dawn of creation.
Much depends on which of these armchair anthropologists is correct. If
people are noble savages, then a domineering leviathan is unnecessary.
Indeed, by forcing people to delineate private property for the state
to recognize-property they might otherwise have shared-the leviathan
creates the very greed and belligerence it is designed to control. A
happy society would be our birthright; all we would need to do is
eliminate the institutional barriers that keep it from us. If, in
contrast, people are naturally nasty, the best we can hope for is an
uneasy truce enforced by police and the army. The two theories have
implications for private life as well. Every child is born a savage
(that is, uncivilized), so if savages are naturally gentle,
childrearing is a matter of providing children with opportunities to
develop their potential, and evil people are products of a society
that has corrupted them. If savages are naturally nasty, then
childrearing is an arena of discipline and conflict, and evil people
are showing a dark side that was insufficiently tamed.
The actual writings of philosophers are always more complex than the
theories they come to symbolize in the textbooks. In reality, the
views of Hobbes and Rousseau are not that far apart. Rousseau, like
Hobbes, believed (incorrectly) that savages were solitary, without
ties of love or loyalty, and without any industry or art (and he may
have out-Hobbes'd Hobbes in claiming they did not even have language).
Hobbes envisioned-indeed, literally drew-his leviathan as an
embodiment of the collective will, which was vested in it by a kind of
social contract; Rousseau's most famous work is called The Social
Contract, and in it he calls on people to subordinate their interests
to a "general will."
Nonetheless, Hobbes and Rousseau limned contrasting pictures of the
state of nature that have inspired thinkers in the centuries since. No
one can fail to recognize the influence of the doctrine of the Noble
Savage in contemporary consciousness. We see it in the current respect
for all things natural (natural foods, natural medicines, natural
childbirth) and the distrust of the man-made, the unfashionability of
authoritarian styles of childrearing and education, and the
understanding of social problems as repairable defects in our
institutions rather than as tragedies inherent to the human
condition.
The other sacred doctrine that often accompanies the Blank Slate is
usually attributed to the scientist, mathematician, and philosopher
René Descartes (1596-1650):
There is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is
by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely
indivisible. . . . When I consider the mind, that is to say, myself
inasmuch as I am only a thinking being, I cannot distinguish in myself
any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire; and
though the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, yet if a
foot, or an arm, or some other part, is separated from the body, I am
aware that nothing has been taken from my mind. And the faculties of
willing, feeling, conceiving, etc. cannot be properly speaking said to
be its parts, for it is one and the same mind which employs itself in
willing and in feeling and understanding. But it is quite otherwise
with corporeal or extended objects, for there is not one of them
imaginable by me which my mind cannot easily divide into parts. . . .
This would be sufficient to teach me that the mind or soul of man is
entirely different from the body, if I had not already been apprised
of it on other grounds.
A memorable name for this doctrine was given three centuries later by
a detractor, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976):
There is a doctrine about the nature and place of minds which is so
prevalent among theorists and even among laymen that it deserves to be
described as the official theory. . . . The official doctrine, which
hails chiefly from Descartes, is something like this. With the
doubtful exception of idiots and infants in arms every human being has
both a body and a mind. Some would prefer to say that every human
being is both a body and a mind. His body and his mind are ordinarily
harnessed together, but after the death of the body his mind may
continue to exist and function. Human bodies are in space and are
subject to mechanical laws which govern all other bodies in
space. . . . But minds are not in space, nor are their operations
subject to mechanical laws. . . .
. . . Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of
it, with deliberate abusiveness, as "the dogma of the Ghost in the
Machine."6 The Ghost in the Machine, like the Noble Savage, arose in
part as a reaction to Hobbes. Hobbes had argued that life and mind
could be explained in mechanical terms. Light sets our nerves and
brain in motion, and that is what it means to see. The motions may
persist like the wake of a ship or the vibration of a plucked string,
and that is what it means to imagine. "Quantities" get added or
subtracted in the brain, and that is what it means to think.
Descartes rejected the idea that the mind could operate by physical
principles. He thought that behavior, especially speech, was not
caused by anything, but freely chosen. He observed that our
consciousness, unlike our bodies and other physical objects, does not
feel as if it is divisible into parts or laid out in space. He noted
that we cannot doubt the existence of our minds-indeed, we cannot
doubt that we are our minds-because the very act of thinking
presupposes that our minds exist. But we can doubt the existence of
our bodies, because we can imagine ourselves to be immaterial spirits
who merely dream or hallucinate that we are incarnate.
Descartes also found a moral bonus in his dualism (the belief that the
mind is a different kind of thing from the body): "There is none which
is more effectual in leading feeble spirits from the straight path of
virtue, than to imagine that the soul of the brute is of the same
nature as our own, and that in consequence, after this life we have
nothing to fear or to hope for, any more than the flies and the
ants."7 Ryle explains Descartes's dilemma:
When Galileo showed that his methods of scientific discovery were
competent to provide a mechanical theory which should cover every
occupant of space, Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives.
As a man of scientific genius he could not but endorse the claims of
mechanics, yet as a religious and moral man he could not accept, as
Hobbes accepted, the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that
human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork.
It can indeed be upsetting to think of ourselves as glorified gears
and springs. Machines are insensate, built to be used, and disposable;
humans are sentient, possessing of dignity and rights, and infinitely
precious. A machine has some workaday purpose, such as grinding grain
or sharpening pencils; a human being has higher purposes, such as
love, worship, good works, and the creation of knowledge and beauty.
The behavior of machines is determined by the ineluctable laws of
physics and chemistry; the behavior of people is freely chosen. With
choice comes freedom, and therefore optimism about our possibilities
for the future. With choice also comes responsibility, which allows us
to hold people accountable for their actions. And of course if the
mind is separate from the body, it can continue to exist when the body
breaks down, and our thoughts and pleasures will not someday be
snuffed out forever.
As I mentioned, most Americans continue to believe in an immortal
soul, made of some nonphysical substance, which can part company with
the body. But even those who do not avow that belief in so many words
still imagine that somehow there must be more to us than electrical
and chemical activity in the brain. Choice, dignity, and
responsibility are gifts that set off human beings from everything
else in the universe, and seem incompatible with the idea that we are
mere collections of molecules. Attempts to explain behavior in
mechanistic terms are commonly denounced as "reductionist" or
"determinist." The denouncers rarely know exactly what they mean by
those words, but everyone knows they refer to something bad. The
dichotomy between mind and body also pervades everyday speech, as when
we say "Use your head," when we refer to "out-of-body experiences,"
and when we speak of "John's body," or for that matter "John's brain,"
which presupposes an owner, John, that is somehow separate from the
brain it owns. Journalists sometimes speculate about "brain
transplants" when they really should be calling them "body
transplants," because, as the philosopher Dan Dennett has noted, this
is the one transplant operation in which it is better to be the donor
than the recipient. The doctrines of the Blank Slate, the Noble
Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine-or, as philosophers call them,
empiricism, romanticism, and dualism-are logically independent, but in
practice they are often found together. If the slate is blank, then
strictly speaking it has neither injunctions to do good nor
injunctions to do evil. But good and evil are asymmetrical: there are
more ways to harm people than to help them, and harmful acts can hurt
them to a greater degree than virtuous acts can make them better off.
So a blank slate, compared with one filled with motives, is bound to
impress us more by its inability to do harm than by its inability to
do good. Rousseau did not literally believe in a blank slate, but he
did believe that bad behavior is a product of learning and
socialization.9 "Men are wicked," he wrote; "a sad and constant
experience makes proof unnecessary." But this wickedness comes from
society: "There is no original perversity in the human heart. There is
not a single vice to be found in it of which it cannot be said how and
whence it entered."11 If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue,
then all of us, like Rousseau, associate blankness with virtue rather
than with nothingness. Think of the moral connotations of the
adjectives clean, fair, immaculate, lily-white, pure, spotless,
unmarred, and unsullied, and of the nouns blemish, blot, mark, stain,
and taint.
The Blank Slate naturally coexists with the Ghost in the Machine, too,
since a slate that is blank is a hospitable place for a ghost to
haunt. If a ghost is to be at the controls, the factory can ship the
device with a minimum of parts. The ghost can read the body's display
panels and pull its levers, with no need for a high-tech executive
program, guidance system, or CPU. The more not-clockwork there is
controlling behavior, the less clockwork we need to posit. For similar
reasons, the Ghost in the Machine happily accompanies the Noble
Savage. If the machine behaves ignobly, we can blame the ghost, which
freely chose to carry out the iniquitous acts; we need not probe for a
defect in the machine's design.
Philosophy today gets no respect. Many scientists use the term as a
synonym for effete speculation. When my colleague Ned Block told his
father that he would major in the subject, his father's reply was
"Luft!"-Yiddish for "air." And then there's the joke in which a young
man told his mother he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she
said, "Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?" But far
from being idle or airy, the ideas of philosophers can have
repercussions for centuries. The Blank Slate and its companion
doctrines have infiltrated the conventional wisdom of our civilization
and have repeatedly surfaced in unexpected places. William Godwin
(1756-1835), one of the founders of liberal political philosophy,
wrote that "children are a sort of raw material put into our hands,"
their minds "like a sheet of white paper."12 More sinisterly, we find
Mao Zedong justifying his radical social engineering by saying, "It is
on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written."13 Even
Walt Disney was inspired by the metaphor. "I think of a child's mind
as a blank book," he wrote. "During the first years of his life, much
will be written on the pages. The quality of that writing will affect
his life profoundly."
Locke could not have imagined that his words would someday lead to
Bambi (intended by Disney to teach self-reliance); nor could Rousseau
have anticipated Pocahontas, the ultimate noble savage. Indeed, the
soul of Rousseau seems to have been channeled by the writer of a
recent Thanksgiving op-ed piece in the Boston Globe:
I would submit that the world native Americans knew was more stable,
happier, and less barbaric than our society today. . . . there were no
employment problems, community harmony was strong, substance abuse
unknown, crime nearly nonexistent. What warfare there was between
tribes was largely ritualistic and seldom resulted in indiscriminate
or wholesale slaughter. While there were hard times, life was, for the
most part, stable and predictable. . . . Because the native people
respected what was around them, there was no loss of water or food
resources because of pollution or extinction, no lack of materials for
the daily essentials, such as baskets, canoes, shelter, or firewood.
—from The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, Copyright © October 2002,
Viking Press, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.
Immortalista
>
> Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
>
> Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
>
> Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
>
> Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
>
> Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
>
> Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
>
> Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
>
> Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
>
Argument By Repetition (Argument Ad Nauseam):
if you say something often enough, some people will begin to
believe it. There are some net.kooks who keeping reposting the same
articles to Usenet, presumably in hopes it will have that effect.
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html#repetition
>
> Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
>
The poverty of the stimulus (POTS) argument is a variant of the
epistemological problem of the indeterminacy of data to theory that
claims that grammar is unlearnable given the linguistic data available
to children. As such, the argument strikes against empiricist accounts
of language acquisition. Inversely, the argument is usually construed
as in favour of linguistic nativism because it leads to the conclusion
that knowledge of some aspects of grammar must be innate. Nativists
claim that humans are born with a specific representational adaptation
for language that both funds and limits their competence to acquire
specific types of natural languages over the course of their cognitive
development and linguistic maturation. The basic idea informs the
teachings of Socrates, Plato, and the Pythagoreans, pervades the work
of the Cartesian linguists and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and surfaces
again with the contemporary linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky. The
argument is now generally used to support theories and hypotheses of
generative grammar. The name was coined by Chomsky in his work Rules
and Representations (Chomsky, 1980). The thesis emerged out of several
of Chomsky's writings on the issue of language acquisition. The
argument has been persuasive within linguistics, forming the empirical
backbone for the theory of universal grammar. It is taught to students
in most linguistics and psycholinguistics courses. Despite a body of
criticism it remains popular amongst linguists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_stimulus
Rod Speed
Immortalista desperately attempted to bullshit its way out of
its predicament and fooled absolutely no one at all, as always.
Immortalist
Getting a little aroused there? Basically, the cognitive dissonance
your experiencing is a state of tension that occurs whenever you
simultaneously hold two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs,
opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent. As you see you do not
compare to my skills level but you deny it at the same time, thus the
childish tantrum I was aiming for. Stated differently, two cognitions
are dissonant if, considering these two cognitions alone, the opposite
of one follows from the other. Because the occurrence of cognitive
dissonance is unpleasant, people are motivated to reduce it; this is
roughly analogous to the processes involved in the induction and
reduction of such drives as hunger or thirst----except that, here, the
driving force arises from cognitive dissonance rather than
physiological needs. To hold two ideas that contradict each other is
to flirt with absurdity, and---as Albert Camus, the existentialist
philosopher, has observed---humans are creatures who sppend their
lives trying to convine themselves their existence is not absurd.
So something is different when you think about Enron and you are at a
point where you must either change you view of Enron or change your
view of what honesty is or reduce each a bit to fit a mutuals non-
arousing response. The cognition; Enron as a representative of
corporate america and the cognition; Enron the book cooker - conflict
so according to social psychology one of these cognitions has to be
changed or there might be more "arousal" in the future when these two
cognitions enter you mind simultaneously.
Rod Speed
> Rod Speed <rod.speed....@gmail.com> wrote
>> Some gutless fuckwit desperately cowering behind
>> Immortalista desperately attempted to bullshit its way out of
>> its predicament and fooled absolutely no one at all, as always.
> Getting a little aroused there?
Nope, I blow off your juvenile antics whenever I see them, child.
<reams of your puerile attempts at insults any 2 year old could leave for dead flushed where they belong>
ZerkonXXXX
> ...Nowhere do people have an equal desire for all members of the
> opposite sex.
Obviously unacquainted with closing time.
> primitive campfires..
as opposed to advanced or evolved campfires?
The first sentence in this book:
"Human mating behavior delights and amuses us and galvanizes our gossip,
but it is also deeply disturbing"
'Deeply disturbing', of course. makes for the best gossip as this book
illustrates.
Day Brown
Eurasian land mass resulted in the emergence of yeoman farmers 10,000+
years ago, and over all those generations, has modified the mental tool
set away from the rapid response to resources on the hunt, to the long
term management of resources at a fixed location.
And if an individual from either end of the land mass moves to live in,
and hybridize with the other, nobody worries about how the kids will
turn out. They will be fully, or even more, functional in either
Oriental or Occidental cultures.
Conversely, those from tribal hunter and/or herder cultures fail to
adapt to modern culture and economics much more often. The hybridization
process is much less predictable, and often the hybrid is torn, wanting
sometimes to range widely in the search for resources, while also
wanting to stay within a known base, never really feeling comfortable no
matter what they end up doing.
Even the agrarian gene pools have some individuals torn like this, but
not so many that it interferes with the functionality of the culture.
3877
Mindlessly superficial. Does not explain either the vikings or the mongols.
Day Brown
>> Even the agrarian gene pools have some individuals torn like this, but
>> not so many that it interferes with the functionality of the culture.
>
> Mindlessly superficial. Does not explain either the vikings or the mongols.
which left to conquer and then dominate, as alphas like to do, which is
easier in conquered lands than at home where there is no obvious
physical diff.
So, only the men who did not care to dominate other people returned to
the homelands. And they are still there. Along with the descendants of
the beta males who never left in the first place.
Up until Genghis Khan, the Zongnu routinely invaded China; but after, so
many warriors stayed in the Western parts of the Mongol empire there
were not enuf left in the Mongol gene pool to significantly threaten
China ever again.
Alpha drive, when combined with superior intelligence, can control
physical violence in favor of more subtle forms of dominance, often
resulting in very effective power structures that benefit mankind. But
without it, the aggression fills our jails.
Ever since Reagan lengthened jail terms, keeping them locked up and out
of the gene pools until they were no longer so sexy, the crime rate in
every generation has declined.
Michael Gordge
> Argument By Repetition (Argument Ad Nauseam):
>
> if you say something often enough, some people will begin to
> believe it.
Thats true, just look at Timmmmm and Cahill, they now believe that the
globe will get cold if man produces 0.000000000001% less of the
earth's gas.
MG
3877
> 3877 wrote:
>> Day Brown wrote:
>>> Its worth noting that the East and West end of the temperate zone
>>> Eurasian land mass resulted in the emergence of yeoman farmers 10,000+
>>> years ago, and over all those generations, has modified the mental
>>> tool set away from the rapid response to resources on the hunt, to
>>> the long term management of resources at a fixed location.
>>>
>>> And if an individual from either end of the land mass moves to live
>>> in, and hybridize with the other, nobody worries about how the kids
>>> will turn out. They will be fully, or even more, functional in either
>>> Oriental or Occidental cultures.
>>>
>>> Conversely, those from tribal hunter and/or herder cultures fail to
>>> adapt to modern culture and economics much more often. The
>>> hybridization process is much less predictable, and often the hybrid
>>> is torn, wanting sometimes to range widely in the search for
>>> resources, while also wanting to stay within a known base, never
>>> really feeling comfortable no matter what they end up doing.
>>>
>>> but not so many that it interferes with the functionality of the culture.
>>
>> Mindlessly superficial. Does not explain either the vikings or the mongols.
> All gene pools have some alpha males. It was the alphas from these
> groups which left to conquer and then dominate, as alphas like to do,
Thats nothing even remotely like how the mongols operated.
> which is easier in conquered lands than at home where there is no
> obvious physical diff.
Even more utterly mindlessly superficial.
> So, only the men who did not care to dominate other people returned to
> the homelands.
Even more utterly mindlessly superficial.
And they are still there. Along with the descendants of
> the beta males who never left in the first place.
Even more utterly mindlessly superficial.
> Up until Genghis Khan, the Zongnu routinely invaded China; but after,
> so many warriors stayed in the Western parts of the Mongol empire
> there were not enuf left in the Mongol gene pool to significantly
> threaten China ever again.
Even more utterly mindlessly superficial.
> Alpha drive, when combined with superior intelligence, can control
> physical violence in favor of more subtle forms of dominance, often
> resulting in very effective power structures that benefit mankind. But
> without it, the aggression fills our jails.
Even more utterly mindlessly superficial.
> Ever since Reagan lengthened jail terms, keeping them locked up and
> out of the gene pools until they were no longer so sexy, the crime
> rate in every generation has declined.
Even more utterly mindlessly superficial.