On May 17, 8:29 am, saint7pe...@hotmail.com wrote:

snipped examples

More examples snipped

the environment that molded the human brain through natural selection
is drastically different than the world humans currently live in

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 [a human impulse towards fairness may be an
instinctual bias]

Ostracism was a procedure ...where a prominent citizen could be
expelled & Shunning ...the act of deliberately avoiding association
with, and habitually keeping away from an individual or group... [may
both be instinctual biases in humans]

free riders are actors who consume more than their fair share of a
resource, or shoulder less than a fair share of the costs [may have
resulted in alignment of other human biases and nueral structures into
forms of punishment]

a universal moral grammar, built into the brains of all humans. The
grammar is a set of principles that operate on the basis of the causes
and consequences of action. Thus, in the same way that we are endowed
with a language faculty that consists of a universal toolkit for
building possible languages, we are also endowed with a moral faculty
that consists of a universal toolkit for building possible moral
systems.

hence it may be hypocrytical to point out some past application, but
it may be hypocrytical to point that out, I don't know...

The Savanna Principle is a theory about the evolutionary roots of the
human brain. ...it asserts that the environment that molded the human
brain through natural selection is drastically different than the
world humans currently live in. This disparity between what man was
designed to do and what he currently can do leads to a host of
societal difficulties, according to the theory. For example, ancestors
who craved sugary and fatty foods lived longer and were healthier than
those who didn't, in a time that such things were relatively scarce.
Today, the abundance of such temptations leads to obesity and heart
disease.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savanna_principle

Evolutionary Psychology strongly rejects the view of the human mind as
tabula rasa, and avers instead that it is content rich and biased. The
human brain, and all of its psychological mechanisms, are adapted to
the EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness) and are therefore
biased in favor of viewing and responding to the world as if it were
still the EEA. The psychological mechanisms we possess in our brain
today are still the same psychological mechanisms that we possessed in
the EEA, just as our hand and pancreas are still the same as they were
10 000 years ago. It is not impossible to overcome this bias through
conscious effort, but it is often difficult. This is why we still
respond to sweets and fats today as if we still lived in the EEA where
such high-calorie foods were rare and malnutrition was an imminent
problem for survival, and we have the strong urge to consume a large
quantity of sweets and fats (even though many of us can consciously
overcome the urge) (Barash 1982, pp. 144–147). It is my contention
that the human brain has unconscious difficulty comprehending and
dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the EEA.

For instance, one of the entities that we know for sure did not exist
in the EEA is television. The fundamental principles of EP would
therefore imply that humans have difficulty recognizing and dealing
with TV. This indeed appears to be the case. People who watch certain
types of TV shows are more satisfied with their friendships, just like
they are if they have more friends or spend more time socializing with
them in real life. It appears that the human brain has difficulty
distinguishing between real friends and imaginary ones they see on TV,
because it did not exist in the EEA (Kanazawa, 2002). It is this
fundamental observation, that our brain and its psychological
mechanisms are strongly biased to view and respond to the environment
as if it were still the EEA, which leads to the Savanna Principle.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/MES/pdf/MDE2004.pdf

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

(1) Ostracism was a procedure under the Athenian democracy where a
prominent citizen could be expelled from the city-state of Athens for
ten years. While some instances clearly expressed popular anger at the
victim, ostracism was often pre-emptive in character. It might be a
way of diffusing a major confrontation between rival politicians by
removing one of them from the scene, or of neutralising someone
thought to be a threat to the state, a possible tyrant. Crucially,
ostacism had no relation to the processes of justice. There was no
charge or defence, and the exile was not in fact a penalty. It was
simply a command from the Athenian people that one of their number be
gone for ten years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism

(2) Shunning is the act of deliberately avoiding association with, and
habitually keeping away from an individual or group. It is a sanction
against association commonly associated with religious groups
following excommunication or dismembership. In some cases, the shunned
person or group is considered anathema, abominable, or spiritually
diseased by shunning group.

A distinct practice sometimes confused with shunning involves the
severing of ties between new members and those of their friends and
family who disapprove of the faith. The Church of Scientology coined
the word disconnection to refer to that practice.

Shunning aims to exclude, punish, and shame a member who commits acts
seen as harmful to the group, who violates the group's norms, or flees
the group. Usually, shunning is done after formal excommunication or
disfellowship and not before. Shunning is often intended to teach
obedience, discipline disobedience/nonconformance by the shunned and
to punish defiance from the shunned. Shunning can also be intended to
shame such members, to compel them back into conforming membership,
and to punish those who persist in violating the group's norms.

As the practice may destroy marriages, break up families, and separate
children from their parents (or vice versa), it is particularly
controversial. The effect of shunning can be very dramatic or even
devastating on the shunnee, as it can damage or destroy the shunned
member's closest familial, spousal, and social bonds. The extent to
which the shunned member's larger social rights in a society are
affected by such shunning can also make a dramatic difference in the
effect of shunning, beyond the aforementioned costs. In cases where a
group or religion is state-sanctioned, a key power, or in the
majority, a shunned former member may face especially severe social,
political, and/or financial costs. Some, especially researchers of
mind control, brainwashing and menticide groups, identify the practice
with "cult-like" or totalitarian behaviour.

Shunning contains aspects of what is known as relational aggression in
the psychological literature. When used by church members and member-
spouse parents against excommunicant parents it contains elements of
what pyschologists call parental alienation. Extreme shunning often
causes traumas to the shunned (and to their innocent dependents)
similar to what is studied in the psychology of torture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning

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

Application to evolutionary psychology

The "tragedy of the commons" features highly in the field of
evolutionary psychology, along with the closely linked "prisoner's
dilemma". Until quite recently, it was widely held that altruism could
not have evolved because the 'tragedy of the commons' would always
favour selfish individuals; whose genes for selfish behaviour would
therefore come to predominate. This contradicted observed reality, and
was therefore a significant conceptual problem. The problem was
eventually solved by models of possible mechanisms that can give rise
to 'Reciprocal altruism', leading to ideas like the 'Tit for tat' rule
(which states that it is beneficial to do onto others as they have
done onto you). This freed evolutionary theory from the limitations
imposed by the concept of 'Inclusive fitness', a previous explanation
for altruism, which proposed that we only help others to the extent
that by doing so we assist the survival of genes that they share with
us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

...we are endowed with a moral faculty that delivers judgments of
right and wrong based on unconsciously operative and inaccessible
principles of action. The theory posits a universal moral grammar,
built into the brains of all humans. The grammar is a set of
principles that operate on the basis of the causes and consequences of
action. Thus, in the same way that we are endowed with a language
faculty that consists of a universal toolkit for building possible
languages, we are also endowed with a moral faculty that consists of a
universal toolkit for building possible moral systems.

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/11/marc-hauser-mor.html

Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal
Sense of Right and Wrong - by Marc Hauser
http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Minds-Nature-Designed-Universal/dp/0060780703

How do humans develop their capacity to make moral decisions?

Do humans have a universal moral grammar, an instinctive, unconscious
tool kit for constructing moral systems.

For example, although we might not be able to articulate immediately
the moral principle underlying the ban on incest, our moral faculty
instinctually declares that incest is disgusting and thus
impermissible.

Humans have evolved a universal moral instinct, unconsciously
propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong independent of
gender, education, and religion. Experience tunes up our moral
actions, guiding what we do as opposed to how we deliver our moral
verdicts.

For hundreds of years, scholars have argued that moral judgments arise
from rational and voluntary deliberations about what ought to be. The
common belief today is that we reach moral decisions by consciously
reasoning from principled explanations of what society determines is
right or wrong. This perspective has generated the further belief that
our moral psychology is founded entirely on experience and education,
developing slowly and subject to considerable variation across
cultures.

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Minds-Nature-Designed-Universal/dp/0060780703/

The proposal, [that people are born with a moral grammar wired into
their neural circuits by evolution] if true, would have far-reaching
consequences. It implies that parents and teachers are not teaching
children the rules of correct behavior from scratch but are, at best,
giving shape to an innate behavior. And it suggests that religions are
not the source of moral codes but, rather, social enforcers of
instinctive moral behavior.

Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the
same moral judgments [&] the system that unconsciously generates moral
judgments is immune to religious doctrine.

The moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal
grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural
machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules for
generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular
language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up.

The moral grammar too is a system for generating moral behavior and
not a list of specific rules. It constrains human behavior so tightly
that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society
-- do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don't
kill; avoid adultery and incest; don't cheat, steal or lie.

But it also allows for variations, since cultures can assign different
weights to the elements of the grammar's calculations. Thus one
society may ban abortion, another may see infanticide as a moral duty
in certain circumstances.

The moral grammar evolved because restraints on behavior are required
for social living and have been favored by natural selection because
of their survival value.

Social animals possess the rudiments of a moral system in that they
can recognize cheating or deviations from expected behavior. But they
generally lack the psychological mechanisms on which the pervasive
reciprocity of human society is based, like the ability to remember
bad behavior, quantify its costs, recall prior interactions with an
individual and punish offenders. Lions cooperate on the hunt, but
there is no punishment for laggards.

The moral grammar now universal among people presumably evolved to its
final shape during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human past, before
the dispersal from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some
50,000 years ago. This may be why events before our eyes carry far
greater moral weight than happenings far away since in those days one
never had to care about people remote from one's environment.

The moral grammar may have evolved through the evolutionary mechanism
known as group selection. A group bound by altruism toward its members
and rigorous discouragement of cheaters would be more likely to
prevail over a less cohesive society, so genes for moral grammar would
become more common.

http://scienceblogs.com/transcript/2006/10/the_moral_mind_ny_times_commen.php

...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 1978
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/qid=1036537594/