> On Aug 30, 1:47 am, sdr sdrodrian.com> wrote:
>

>> On Aug 29, 6:30 pm, DaveInLakeVi...@webtv.net
>> (Dave in Lake Villa) wrote: SDR wrote:

>

>>>> 'Enough of this nonsense:
>>>> Fine Vick a few thousands or whatever. And let
>>>> him get on with his life. This notion of
>>>> crucifying him for putting dogs
>>>> together so they can do what comes
>>>> natural to them is what is detestable
>>>> and insulting to the humanity of us all.
>>>> S D Rodrian

>

>>> REPLY: Yeah...afterall, its just Darwinian
>>> Evolution of survival of the
>>> fittest being logically and practically played
>>> out in society ;

>

>> I don't quite get the connection. "Darwinian
>> Evolution" is the Law of Life. It's not as if
>> you, I, or any other dog can reject it. First
>> stop breathing. You may think yourself a fairy,
>> but first try to fly by your pixie dust alone:
>> You can no more choose to be a horse than a
>> duck can drive your taxi ... no matter what you
>> believe. Evolution is "the way of life." It is
>> why/how we are here. It is the explanation
>> of why we are the way we are. The alternative
>> is an empty "because!" That is the definition
>> of all religious arguments against evolution:
>> An empty because.

>
> Then your saying that evolutionary theory is part of a group of
> theories about life? I agree that seems to be the best we have
> compared to the others.
>
> ...>> > In fact, Hitlers murdering

>>> acts as well as Stalin and Musellini which
>>> amounted to many many
>>> millions of weaker people being
>>> 'Evolutionary Cleansed' wasnt at all
>>> wrong either.

>

>> You could also mention Catholics butchering
>> Protestants, and Protestants slaughtering
>> Catholics.

>
> ...>
>
> Well said.
>

>>> Lastly, in keeping with
>>> pop-Darwinian philosophy....one
>>> should just do as he wants since there is
>>> no morality in the Natural
>>> Selection process ,

>

>> Well, that is true in the sense that no natural
>> moral law exists to arrest our judgment (we often
>> ARE as immoral as we like). ...

>
> ...innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and
> unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality
> evolved as instinct. If that perception is correct, science may soon
> be in a position to investigate the very origin and meaning of human
> values, from which all ethical pronouncements and much of political
> practice flow.
>
> Philosophers themselves, most of whom lack an evolutionary
> perspective, have not devoted much time to the problem. They examine
> the precepts of ethical systems with reference to their consequences
> and not their origins. Thus John Rawls opens his influential A Theory
> of Justice (1971) with a proposition he regards as beyond dispute: "In
> a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as
> settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political
> bargaining or to the calculus of social interests." Robert Nozick
> begins Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) with an equally firm
> proposition: "Individuals have rights, and there are things no person
> or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong
> and far-reaching are these rights they raise the question of what, if
> anything, the state and its omcials.may do." These two premises are
> somewhat different in content, and they lead to radically different
> prescriptions. Rawls would allow rigid social control to secure as
> close an approach as possible to the equal distribution of society's
> rewards. Nozick sees the ideal society as one governed by a minimal
> state, empowered only to protect its citizens from force and fraud,
> and with unequal distribution of rewards wholly permissible. Rawls
> rejects the meritocracy; Nozick accepts it as desirable except in
> those cases where local communities voluntarily decide to experiment
> with egalitarianism. Like everyone else, philosophers measure their
> personal emotional responses to various alternatives as though
> consulting a hidden oracle.
>
> That oracle resides in the deep emotional centers of the brain, most
> probably within the limbic system, a complex array of neurons and
> hormone-secreting cells located just beneath the "thinking" portion of
> the cerebral cortex. Human emotional responses and the more general
> ethical practices based on them have been programmed to a substantial
> degree by natural selection over thousands of generations. The
> challenge to science is to measure the tightness of the constraints
> caused by the programming, to find their source in the brain, and to
> decode their significance through the reconstruction of the
> evolutionary history of the mind. This enterprise will be the logical
> complement of the continued study of cultural evolution.
>
> Success will generate the second dilemma, which can be stated as
> follows: Which of the censors and motivators should be obeyed and
> which ones might better be curtailed or sublimated? These guides are
> the very core of our humanity. They and not the belief in spiritual
> apartness distinguish us from electronic computers. At some time in
> the future we will have to decide how human we wish to remain-in this
> ultimate, biological sense-because we must consciously choose among
> the alternative emotional guides we have inherited. To chart our
> destiny means that we must shift from automatic control based on our
> biological properties to precise steering based on biological
> knowledge.
>
> Because the guides of human nature must be examined with a complicated
> arrangement of mirrors, they are a deceptive subject, always the
> philosopher's deadfall. The only way forward is to study human nature
> as part of the natural sciences, in an attempt to integrate the
> natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities. I can
> conceive of no ideological or formalisric shortcut. Neurobiology
> cannot be learned at the feer of a guru. The consequences of genetic
> history cannot be chosen by legislatures. Above all, for our own
> physical well-being if nothing else, ethical philosophy must not be
> left in the hands of the merely wise. Although human progress can be
> achieved by intuition and force of will, only hard-won empirical
> knowledge of our biological nature will allow us to make optimum
> choices among the competing criteria of progress.
>
> On Human Nature - Edward O. Wilson 1978http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/qid=1036537594/
>
> ...> Except, of course,
>

>> the one principle which all living creatures must
>> (and do) observe... namely:

>

>> "When one does not learn to control
>> oneself, all one does is turn control of
>> oneself over to others."

>
> I thought you said there are no morals or principles?
>
> To become leaders or followers may be an instinctual drive, deriving
> from 10s of thousands of generations, whereby these types survived and
> others died. But the theory of "altruism" not to be confused with the
> sociological uses of the term, could have lead to an instinctual drive
> for "fair trade" or "fairness" and we may be driven to fuck with
> cheaters and parasites.
>
> Altruistic behaviour is common throughout the animal kingdom,
> particularly in species with complex social structures. For example,
> vampire bats regularly regurgitate blood and donate it to other
> members of their group who have failed to feed that night, ensuring
> they do not starve. In numerous bird species, a breeding pair receives
> help in raising its young from other 'helper' birds, who protect the
> nest from predators and help to feed the fledglings. Vervet monkeys
> give alarm calls to warn fellow monkeys of the presence of predators,
> even though in doing so they attract attention to themselves,
> increasing their personal chance of being attacked. In social insect
> colonies (ants, wasps, bees and termites), sterile workers devote
> their whole lives to caring for the queen, constructing and protecting
> the nest, foraging for food, and tending the larvae. Such behaviour is
> maximally altruistic: sterile workers obviously do not leave any
> offspring of their own -- so have personal fitness of zero -- but
> their actions greatly assist the reproductive efforts of the queen.
>
> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/
>
> Reciprocal altruism
>
> In evolutionary biology, reciprocal altruism is a form of altruism in
> which one organism provides a benefit to another in the expectation of
> future reciprocation. This is equivalent to the Tit for tat strategy
> in game theory. It would only be expected to evolve in the presence of
> a mechanism to identify and punish "cheaters". An example of
> reciprocal altruism is blood-sharing in the vampire bat, in which bats
> feed regurgitated blood to those who have not collected much blood
> themselves knowing that they themselves may someday benefit from this
> same donation; cheaters are remembered by the colony and ousted from
> this collaboration.
>
> In a series of ground-breaking contributions to biology in the early
> 1970s Robert Trivers introduced the theories of reciprocal altruism
> (1971), parental investment (1972), and parent-offspring conflict
> (1974). Trivers' paper "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism" (1971)
> elaborates the mathematics of reciprocal altruism and includes human
> reciprocal altruism as one of the three examples used to illustrate
> the model, arguing that "it can be shown that the details of the
> psychological system that regulates this altruism can be explained by
> this model." In particular, Trivers argues for the following
> characteristics as functional processes subserving reciprocal
> altruism:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_altruism
>
> Free rider problem
>

>>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

>
> In economics, collective bargaining, and political science, free
> riders are actors who consume more than their fair share of a
> resource, or shoulder less than a fair share of the costs of its
> production. The free rider problem is the question of how to prevent
> free riding from taking place, or at least limit its negative effects.
>
> Because the notion of 'fairness' is controversial, free riding is
> usually only considered to be an economic "problem" when it leads to
> the non-production or under-production of a public good, and thus to
> Pareto inefficiency, or when it leads to the excessive use of a common
> property resource.
>
> A common example of a free rider problem is defense spending: no
> person can be excluded from being defended by a state's military
> forces, and thus free riders may refuse or avoid paying for being
> defended, even though they are still as well guarded as those who
> contribute to the state's efforts. Therefore, it is usual for the
> government to avoid relying on volunteer donations, using taxes and
> conscription instead.
>
> In the labor union context, a free rider is an employee who pays no
> union dues or agency shop fees, but nonetheless receives the same
> benefits of union representation as dues-payers. Under U.S. law,
> unions owe a duty of fair representation to all workers they
> represent, regardless of whether they pay dues. Some jurists,
> including Antonin Scalia have questioned the fairness, if not the
> legality, of this practice.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem
>

>>> besides, the Universe was accidental so our brains
>>> and thought processes were accidental
>>> compilations upon accidental
>>> compilations too ----

>

>> Well, true, but evolution does not produce intelligent
>> people by design. What is does is produce people
>> (by making teens horny, mostly) and then it waits
>> to see which ones of them drive drunk, do drugs,
>> play with high explosives, juggle bottles of
>> fissionable materials, yell at the cops who pull them
>> over, or jump into tiger dens at their local zoo.

>
> Actually natural selection, or specifically "sexual and cultural"
> selection might design any of the odd behaviors humans display
> compared to other animals. This by constructing "set point"
> thermostatic instincts that make each of us move toward the mean of
> our particular genes.
>
> The mind is an entertainment system, evolved only for the purpose of
> stimulating other brains.
>
> - A Software Peacock's Tail. -
>
> Why the human mind evolved? Intelligence is not a by-product of
> surplus brain size, it actively evolved, like the peacock's tail, for
> courtship and mating, and thereby shaped human nature.
>
> Why does our species tell jokes, build monuments, compose sonatas,
> give to charity, compete in sports, follow fashion? Our endless
> inventiveness, our elaborate culture, seem to defy Darwinian
> explanation. They are our sexual ornaments, our peacocks' tails,
> displaying our value to potential mates.
>
> Consciousness, morality, creativity, language, and art: these are the
> traits that make us human. Scientists have traditionally explained
> these qualities as merely a side effect of surplus brain size, but
> they are rally sexual attractors, not side effects. This argument is
> based on Darwin's theory of sexual selection, which until now has
> played second fiddle to Darwin's theory of natural selection, and
> draws on ideas and research from a wide range of fields, including
> psychology, economics, history, and pop culture.
>
> Sexual selection theory rather than natural selection-- is a theory
> about how the human mind has developed the sophistication of a
> peacock's tail to encourage sexual choice and the refining of art,
> morality, music, and literature. Mate choice, male or female may be
> the reason we have art and possibly even the (self).
>
> Why human brains have so much capacity for creativity, language, and
> consciousness-- are not fully explained by Darwinian natural
> selection, but sexual selection by mate choices for and by breeding
> brutes. Sexual Selection, Darwin's 'other' theory, has finally come in
> from the cold and is now one of the hottest topics in modern
> Darwinism. The idea that the human mind evolved as a sort of software
> peacock's tail has been mooted before, usually to be dismissed in
> favor of some alternative theory.
>
> That large personalities can be as sexually enticing as oversize
> breasts or biceps may indeed prove comforting, but denuding sexual
> chemistry can be a curiously unsexy business, akin to analyzing humor.
> As a courting display of my own arogent intellectual plumage, though,
> my ideas are an agent-provocateur an chest swelled with ideas and
> articulate conjecture. While occasionally my magpie instinct may loot
> fool's gold, overall it provides an accessible and attractive insight
> into modern Darwinism and the survival of the sexiest. Join me now as
> we go down in spectacular flames.
>
> The Mating Mind:
> How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
> by Geoffrey Millerhttp://www.amazon.com/Mating-Mind-Sexual-Choice-Evolution/dp/038549517X/
>
> http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/miller/miller_p2.html
>
> http://tinyurl.com/pwd9
>
> Very good responses though.