[extropy-chat] FW: Mail System Error - Forwarded from Keith

[Brandon Reinhart]

I usually get a bounce the first time I mail the list each day. I don't post
much, but when I do I usually have to attempt it twice before it takes.
Nothing else is wrong with my email config.

Brandon

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 10:36 PM
To: 'ExI chat list'
Subject: [extropy-chat] FW: Mail System Error - Forwarded from Keith


Extros, Keith Henson is having a lot of bounces of his ExI posts.  I can see
no problem with his account, but Eugen is looking at it to see if we can do
anything about it.  Anyone else having trouble?

In the mean time, I forward this from Keith.  He will by laying out of this
discussion for now, not for lack of interest but for technical failure of
the com system. 

spike

...
>
>At 09:30 AM 6/30/2006 -0700, Jef wrote:
>
>snip
>
>>Keith, I agree with you that Maslow operated without the benefit of
>>current thinking in evolutionary psychology (and it shows), but
>>wouldn't you agree that his hierarchy of needs still generally holds
>>and was intended to be descriptive while evolutionary psychology is
>>intended to be explanatory?
>
>No.  It does not hold, and if it is going to be considered science, 
>description and explanation have to be in harmony.
>
>I dislike being hard nosed about this, but there comes a time when you 
>just have to junk older models for better models.
>
>Contrast Maslow's "A Theory of Human Motivation (1943," with Azar Gat's 
>article: <quote>
>
>THE HUMAN MOTIVATIONAL COMPLEX: EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND THE CAUSES OF 
>HUNTER-GATHERER FIGHTING
>
>Azar Gat
>
>Part I: Primary Somatic and Reproductive Causes
>
>At the centre of this study is the age-old philosophical and psychological 
>inquiry into the nature of the basic human system of motivation. Numerous 
>lists of basic needs and desires have been put together over the 
>centuries, more or less casually or convincingly. The most recent ones 
>show little if any marked progress over the older, back to Thomas Hobbes's 
>Leviathan, 6
>(e.g. Maslow 1970 [1954]; Burton 1990).
>
>In the absence of an evolutionary perspective, these lists have always had 
>something arbitrary and trivial about them. They lacked a unifying 
>regulatory rationale that would suggest why the various needs and desires 
>came to be, or how they related to one another.
>
>Arguing that the human motivational system as a whole should be approached 
>from the evolutionary perspective, this study focuses on the causes of 
>fighting. It examines what can be meaningfully referred to as the 'human 
>state of nature', the 99.5 percent of the genus Homo's evolutionary 
>history in which humans lived as hunter-gatherers.
>
>In this 'state of nature' people's behaviour patterns are generally to be 
>considered as evolutionarily adaptive. They form the evolutionary 
>inheritance that we have carried with us throughout later history, when 
>this inheritance has constantly interacted and been interwoven with the 
>human staggering cultural development.
>
>snip
>
></quote>
>
>http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf
>
>[Well worth reading--several times!]
>
>Maslow is just wrong in his analysis of human needs saying that ones 
>higher up the list will trump lower ones..
>
>1. Physiological
>2. Safety
>3. Love/Belonging
>4. Esteem
>5. Actualization
>
>In order to save family members, particularly children, but other close 
>relatives according to Hamilton and Haldane's relatedness criteria, people 
>will ignore safety and even put themselves in places where they will be 
>killed (overriding 1 and 2 for 3).
>
>Likewise in attempting to gain status (#4) males particularly will ignore 
>their safety and even psychological needs.
>
>Maslow *did* recognize that status seeking was a human need, in that I 
>have to give him credit.  But he had no idea of *why* or how it might 
>override others of his list.  To understand that you must go to 
>evolutionary psychology and the hunter gatherer environment in which it 
>evolved and consider how genes for such behavior would have had a 
>selective advantage.
>
>You simply are not going to get anywhere trying to understand drug 
>addiction, Stockholm syndrome, suicide bombers or war with Maslow.  And if 
>you don't understand a problem chances are better than 50-50 that actions 
>you take on the basis of the wrong model are going to make the problem 
>worse.  I.e., D.A.R.E.
>
>There is a difference between honoring influential people of the past and 
>following their models that are now known to be incomplete or just wrong.
>
>Best wishes,
>
>Keith Henson
>



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