[ExI] EP was Sarah Palin

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Fri Jul 23 15:51:10 UTC 2010


On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 5:00 AM,  BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am not arguing against your theory in the context of nations going
> to war when the nation faces a choice of starve or war with the
> neighbour nation.

Modern nations are in the tens of millions to hundreds of millions.
It's downright amazing to me that psychological mechanisms evolved in
the context of tribes with that almost never had 100 members scales up
by a factor of a million.

And it is trickier than just starving because the "bleak times
a-coming" detection mechanism has a floating set point, same as most
psychological responses.  (The three bucket experiment also see
Cialdini re the timing of race riots.)

> (Although there could be exceptions even to this
> where the nation doesn't have enough young men to fight a war).

If a nation is starting a war, generally the reason is the results of
high population growth.

> What I have difficulty with is stretching the theory to apply to
> terrorist groups within a nation.

The theory either applies to wars and related social disruptions or it
doesn't.  In any case, where do you draw the line between terrorist
groups and wars?  (The mess in Sri Lanka for example.)

> The IRA never had more than a few
> thousand members. A tiny fraction of the population.

That is true, but they had much, much wider support among Irish
Catholics, even to a substantial extent in the US.  They could not
function without the wider support and when that dried up, so did the
IRA.

> They wanted to
> stop the victimisation of Catholics in Northern Ireland by the
> Protestants who ran everything. When they achieved that objective they
> stopped bombing and shooting. I don't see any need to make the theory
> more complex than that.

The typical reason people feel (and are) victimized is for being poor.
 They are poor to a large extent because there are too many of them
for their ecological niche.  But that's not enough to trigger wars,
what you need is the future looking worse than the present.  And to
make wars or unrest go away, what you need is a brighter future.  At
least that's the way the conditions in the EEA are expected to have
shaped the gene pool.

> Take South Africa for example. The ANC (a former terrorist group) now
> forms the government and the terrorism has stopped.

Terrorism organized by the ANC stopped.  The future prospects for
South Africa are *really* bleak.  The only "bright spot" is the HIV
epidemic.

> Terrorist groups usually arise to fight a specific problem. Once that
> problem is solved, the need for terrorism goes away.

Alternately, you can make a case that the former rulers of SA lost a
war and left.  There were few enough of them to make an exit possible.

> This doesn't deny your theory of why nations go to war. I'm just
> saying it is a stretch to try and apply it to 'little' local problems.

The EP approach should apply better at smaller scales, closer to the
size of hunter gatherer groups.

I don't think this model (I hesitate to call it a theory) of the
evolution of human psychological mechanisms is complete.  But getting
involved in everything from tribal wars to terrorist suicides is
irrational from the viewpoint of the individual.  The point of the
model is that (at least in the past) irrational from an individual
viewpoint was a rational survival strategy for genes in the context of
inclusive fitness.

Keith



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