[extropy-chat] Edge: Thank Goodness! By Daniel C. Dennett

Mon Nov 6 03:28:30 UTC 2006

>
>I have been doing a bit of ranting on this subject myself on the Harris
>page.
>http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060916_sam_harris_rottweiler_barks/

Only about 1/4 of this made it to the comments log, so here is the whole thing;

Joan wrote:

I have been stepping back from our dialogue to get sort of an overview, 
instead of tripping over specifics too much. Keith, it seems you are 
proposing a psychology of evolutionary behavior of man's warlike behavior. 
In a nutshell, when faced with bleak prospects imminently or in the far 
distance, such as Iran, you claim that man will resort to war to enhance 
his probability of survival.

Close, but not exactly on the mark.  You have to be extremely careful with 
the wording in models if you want them to be useful for predicting the future.

And, you have to keep in mind that the psychological traits leading to wars 
evolved in the Stone Age.  Going to war (as Azar Gat points out) wasn't 
always the only option.  Sometimes people under resource pressure could 
move far away.

"Enhance his probability of survival" isn't the right way to state it 
either.  War is a chancy business today and was no less so when high tech 
was sharp rocks.  For the individual, and even the kin group, war only came 
about because the alternative was worse.

What resulted is the evolved psychological mechanisms we have for 
amplifying xenophobic memes and going out to kill neighbors when our 
ancestors perceived "hard times a-coming.  In the Stone Age such traits 
statistically and over a long time worked to enhance "inclusive 
fitness."  Inclusive fitness has genes "winning" even if many carriers of 
the genes die, provided there are more carriers of the genes after a war 
than would be the case taking an alternate course.

Perhaps an example from history would help.  Consider the Spartans at 
Thermopylae:

" . . . as well as a symbol of courage against extremely overwhelming odds. 
The heroic sacrifice of the Spartans and the Thespians has captured the 
minds of many throughout the ages and has given birth to many cultural 
references as a result."

. . .

"Knowing the likely outcome of the battle, Leonidas selected his men on one 
simple criterion: he took only men who had fathered sons that were old 
enough to take over the family responsibilities of their fathers. The 
rationale behind this criterion was that the Spartans knew their death was 
almost certain at Thermopylae. Plutarch mentions, in his Sayings of Spartan 
Women, that after encouraging her husband before his departure for the 
battlefield, Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas I asked him what she should do 
when he had left. To this, Leonidas replied:

     'Marry a good man, and have good children.'"

******

Spooky!  Almost as if the Greeks understood EP and genetics.  Perhaps 
living closer to the Stone Age and incessant war they would find it easier 
to understand compared to modern people.

Leonidas' death did,/b> save Greek genes, specifically the Spartans', 
more specifically his genes through his children and even more specifically 
the genes of his male children who would have been killed by the invaders.

Along with the preceding victory at Marathon some ten years earlier, "their 
victory endowed the Greeks with a faith in their destiny that was to endure 
for three centuries, during which western culture was born."

Maybe because of certain universal moral precepts, such as in the NY 
Times article Maani cited like the prohibition against unjustified killing, 
men develop certain ideologies that give a sort of morally acceptable 
permission to suspend these precepts to engage in war. Communism and 
religions are two such ideologies. You refer to such ideologies as memes 
that people adapt and act on to preserve their self- interest of survival.

You make it sound conscious, it's not.

<i>EP seems to be an inter-disciplinary study of sorts encompassing 
psychology, anthropology, and biology </i>

Not exactly, you are mixing levels.  Biology (that is evolutionary biology) 
is the level upon which EP builds, like biology builds on the chemistry level.

Anthropology (and the rest of the social sciences) are at a higher 
level.  EP is essentially putting a foundation under a lot of formerly 
free-floating disciplines.

"Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge 
and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the 
structure of the human mind. It is not an area of study, like vision, 
reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology 
that can be applied to any topic within it.

"In this view, the mind is a set of information-processing machines that 
were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our 
hunter-gatherer ancestors. This way of thinking about the brain, mind, and 
behavior is changing how scientists approach old topics, and opening up new 
ones.

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html

as I gather you are suggesting that these memes may reflect certain 
chemical dispositions.

<i>Some musings

If memes do not reflect a biology, how are they different from belief 
systems?

Memes are at a higher level yet. They depend on the existence of creatures 
able to learn information patterns from each other. And beliefs are 
memes. Can one animal pass along information patterns (often behaviors) to 
another? Memes are what they pass, pure replicating information, elements 
of culture, ideas, beliefs--all fit the concept of a meme.

This brings me to my broader question-What does this meme theory give us 
that prior theories have not?

Clear, accurate models are of vast importance in reducing human 
misery.  Consider the germ theory of disease as an example.  Very little 
progress was made before Pasteur and Koch developed that theory.

Anthropologists already speak about how belief systems develop, spread, 
assist man and die out in tribes.

When you use "meme" instead of "idea" the replication aspect is 
important.  It's a model to help explain the persistence of elements of 
culture.

In one of my earliest meme papers I noted (without a biological or EP 
explanation) that economic downturns are accompanied by upswings in 
neo-Nazi movements in the US.

The essence of memetics has been around at least a century.  It is 
encapsulated in "Ideas have a life of their own."  If you take that serious 
and apply what we know about living things to ideas, you have memetics.

Another musing
 all wars minimally are wars of perceived self-interest.

Close again, but not exactly on the mark.  It's hard to do, but to 
understand this you need to get your mind to look at the world from the 
"viewpoint of genes."  _Selfish Gene_ and the more difficult _Extended 
Phenotype_ by Richard Dawkins are still a very good place to get this 
essential but alien viewpoint.

Hunter-gatherer wars were in the self-interest of genes. More 
recent wars, particularly the southwest corn farmers 800 years ago, may not 
be. (Side effects due to a different level of technology caused them to 
die out over a vast area.)

All wars need perceived moral permission prior to engagement and during 
engagement. History tells us that there have been religious wars. And there 
have been wars that do not pertain to religion per se. My sense is that you 
are claiming that no matter the smokescreen that gives permission, all wars 
are fought with the bleak future motivation as the paramount one for the 
war.

It isn't just permission, it is an essential part of synching 
hunter-gatherer warriors up into a killing frenzy.

<i>Now I can agree theoretically but it is a stretch
Iran being a case in 
point
</i>

Every case (post agriculture) has to be considered very carefully.  While 
humans still have the psychological traits honed in the Stone Age, the 
environment is very different.  For example, the vast majority of human 
evolution was when our ancestors lived in bands of under 100 people.  The 
last really big war (WW II) involved hundreds of millions.  It is not 
obvious if or how this difference in scale modulates the traits.  Certainly 
a million times more population to draw leaders from is going to get ones 
further out on the bell curve, for example, Genghis Khan, 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan,

Iran has the option of developing nuclear energy peaceably with IAEA 
inspections etc, to prepare for the day that the oil wells run dry but Iran 
has not opted to do so
it has opted for belligerence 
Palestinians have not 
opted for security and prosperity but have also opted for belligerence...

Option and opted imply rational thinking.  The essence of the theory is 
that the ability of humans to think rationally gets trashed as they go into 
war mode.  This is one of the sad legacies out of our hunter-gatherer 
past.  If either of your examples were thinking rationally, there would be 
a major push for birth control.

perhaps the bleak theory has to be expanded to not only include material 
survival, i.e., gathering your protein but also perceived psychological 
survival i.e., a bleak psychological future theory of war..

In _Influence: the new psychology of modern persuasion_ (1984 and more 
recent editions) Robert Cialdini, goes into a great deal of psychological 
background.  One of these (using the three bucket experiment) is the 
importance of relative changes.  It is clear from the lack of revolts in 
India that grinding poverty (the lifelong prospect for a large segment of 
the population) won't spark war mode.

Why?

Because the future looks no bleaker than the conditions they have lived in 
all their lives, and people tend to respond to relative change.

<i>This may explain Kim Jong Il, Ahmadinejad, Caesar and Alexander
.</i>

Perhaps. We should not forget that our view of wars are highly 
biased, essentially our knowledge of wars is since the invention of 
writing, which is to say 6000 years of the 6 million since we and the 
chimps parted ways.

Lastly, although religions are exploited to give permission to engage in 
war, it is important to note that religions are not founded with the 
primary end to give man permission to fight wars.

I think there have been cases where religions were founded to support wars.

They have other more immediate functions and are generally called upon 
to meet other of man's complex needs. Religions are bastardized. It is 
crucial in scholarly study to give an authentic depiction of the intent of 
religion and other ideologies, distinguishing their paramount intent from 
their misuse or corruption when making judgments about value of these 
ideologies.

I seriously think your concern is directed to the wrong level.  Persisting 
at that level will get you no further than being concerned about fever 
would have prevented epidemic diseases.

Religions are a consequence of human psychological traits.  Where, did 
those come from?

" My contention, simply put, is that the evolutionary approach is the only 
approach in the social and behavioral sciences that deals with why, in an 
ultimate sense, people behave as they do. As such, it often unmasks the 
universal hypocrisies of our species, peering behind self-serving notions 
about our moral and social values to reveal the darker side of human 
nature." (Silverman 2003)

You can say that religions arise from human needs, but it's the same 
question, where did those "needs" come from?

Pascal Boyer doesn't take it far enough, but I suggest he is taking steps 
in the right direction.

" . . . anthropologist Pascal Boyer that discusses the evolutionary origins 
of religious concepts. Through an examination of the mind's inference 
systems - how they work and how they have been shaped over time - Boyer 
explains how it is that we have the religious concepts we do, and why they 
have been so culturally successful. Boyer presents evidence from many 
specialized disciplines including anthropology, cognitive science, 
linguistics, and evolutionary biology to support the idea that a 
naturalistic explanation of religion is possible; moreover, such an 
approach is necessary if the field and study of religion is going to make 
any progress."

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

Otherwise they are misrepresented. We have seen some heinous tragedies 
in science but we would not want to say that because of them that these 
tragedies were this is the purpose of science. Think thalidomide here.

True, though there is more to the story.

"In 1964, a French physician named Jacob Sheskin was trying to help a 
critically-ill male patient with erythema nodosum leprosum (ENL), a very 
painful complication of leprosy. He looked throughout his small hospital 
for anything that might help his patient stop aching long enough to sleep. 
He came across a bottle of thalidomide tablets, and remembered that the 
drug had been effective in helping mentally ill patients sleep - and also 
that it was banned. Thinking he had nothing to lose, Sheskin gave the man 
two tablets of thalidomide. The patient slept for hours, and he felt good 
enough to get out of bed without aid when he woke up. The result was soon 
followed by more favorable experiences, followed by a clinical trial. Dr. 
Sheskin's drug of last resort revolutionized the care of leprosy, and led 
to the closing of most leprosy hospitals."

It was my engineer husband's idea about the earthquakes and tsunami's as 
a type of nature's population control
I think this could be right because 
in the grand scheme of things, population control does not have to be 
causally linked to a given population, just the way of nature.

As a guess he is a civil engineer.  Most of the other engineering 
specialties tend to be more restrictive using of the word.

<i>Hepburn/Tracy...humor, but perhaps as women's attention turns from 
childbearing and home to the corporate sector etc there will be rise in 
female aggression and hence in the total amount of aggression in society

think of it like the pressure/ volume law governing gas, as one decreases, 
the other increases and vice versa
</i>

It could be.  But you would have to factor in fewer wars to see if the net 
result was desirable.

The danger with the decrease in reproduction as a way to stem war is 
that reproduction is a delicate balance. If reproduction declines too much, 
the bleak future again emerges and then war, according to your theory.

That would be really perverse.  I can't think of an example where a country 
with a declining population went to war.  In any case, Japan will provide a 
test case shortly.

<i>Russia may be a good crucible to study here</i>

Possibly.  I have not given a lot of thought to the problems in 
Russia.  Some of them are probably genetic such as sensitivity to 
alcohol.  Alcohol seems to have come late to the Russians and they are 
still in the process of genetically getting used to it.  (Unexposed 
populations range up to 95% alcoholics--if they can get it.)

and the more affluent European nations like Sweden and Germany whose 
many immigrants are not melding and working to bolster the economy but 
actually are causing more of a threat to their viability.

France has certainly had problems of this sort.

Keith Henson

(sorry about the HTML tags)