[extropy-chat] evolution and adoption

Kevin Freels kevinfreels at hotmail.com
Tue Dec 23 15:15:13 UTC 2003


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Walker" <mark at permanentend.org>
To: "Damien Broderick" <thespike at earthlink.net>; "ExI chat list"
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Monday, December 22, 2003 7:22 AM
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] evolution and adoption


>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Damien Broderick"
>
> > I'm not sure how tongue in cheek this is, Mark. What's you've described
> is,
> > after all, exactly what wealthy people did in the 19th and early 20th,
and
> > indeed perhaps all the way back to the invention of hierachical power
> > culture. Wet nurses, nannies, private tutors, boarding schools or their
> > harsh equivalent; all these allowed the luckless wives of the rich to
> > produce one child rapidly after another, many of them doomed to perish,
> > without wasting time and effort on emotional support, bonding, etc--and
> the
> > wonderful result was that these warped kids proved just the right stuff
> for
> > going out and building empires, thus perpetuating the process. Until it
> > stopped working. And now nations like the UK struggle to deal with the
> > legacy bullshit embedded in the culture.
> >
> I certainly don't deny that this sort of thing happened, and it didn't
> always happen with the rich.  Rousseau (who was not rich) had five
children
> with his mistress and gave them all up to orphanages, which was to subject
> his children to even more appalling conditions that the rich foisted on
> their children. My point simply is that since orphanages and adoption give
> one's offspring a high probability of survival it seems to make
evolutionary
> sense to have as many children as possible and give them up to such
> agencies. I agree with you that this is not necessarily a good thing, only
> that it seems to make sense, evolutionarily speaking.
>
It's easy, when considering human activity, to forget that there's a
cultural side to human evolution. Unless you are so powerful that you are
"untouchable", doing things that are culturally unacceptable doesn;t help
you get along with the rest of the "tribe". We are social creatures and the
unspoken agreement may be "have no more children that you can personally
take care of. We won't have to worry about taking care of your children and
you won't have to worry about taking care of ours". Culturally, the survival
of the tribe is more important than the reproductive success of one
individual. This cultural signifigance doesn;t apply to the worms or fish
you are describing.



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