[ExI] Physics versus psychology

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Mon Oct 25 19:54:22 UTC 2010


The binding theory is that physiological traits and behaviors (human
and animal) are subject to evolutionary selection.

People don't leap off cliffs and tend to be very careful close to
places where a fall could hurt them.  You can predict this simply from
the fact that people who do leap off cliffs and are not careful in
places where a fall could hurt or kill them don't have as many
descendants as prudent humans.

Like much of EP, this is so obvious it doesn't seem to need an
evolutionary explanation.  But the same method can be applied to much
more complicated traits, such as seeking status.

There are good reasons to think social life in the hunter gatherer era
was much like the present or historical traditional low tech peoples
who have been studied.

One of the features of those groups is that stealing women from one
group to another was relatively common, typically around 10%.  So in
the past some fraction on the order of 1 in 10 of our female ancestors
were captured into a new tribe.

When this happened, the woman could adapt to the new situation and
have children with her captors or if she didn't adapt, most likely
die.  Guess which ones we are descended from.

Over thousands of generations, that's a hell of a selection pressure,
enough it seems to have selected for mental mechanisms that show up
today as Stockholm syndrome or, more descriptively, capture-bonding.

John Tooby figured this out around 1980, but didn't publish.  It
dawned on me 15 or 16 years later.

EP will be rejected if no connections are found between genes and
behavior.  How likely do you think *that* is?

Keith

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 10:51 AM, Dan <dan_ust at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The lack of a major figure, to me too, doesn't matter. The lack of a major,
> binding theory, though, seems to halt progress somewhat. (Then again, maybe
> chaos is a good thing here. I don't know. Have to wait to see what happens.)
>
> Regards,
>
> Dan
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
> To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> Sent: Mon, October 25, 2010 12:54:22 PM
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Physics versus psychology
>
> On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 6:47 AM, Dan <dan_ust at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I think more of the problem relates back to what someone mentioned earlier:
>> there seems to be no key figure in the history of psychology -- no Newton or
>> Darwin. I actually think it's not so much this as no broadly agreed upon
> theory
>> of psychology akin to classical mechanics in biology or the plate tectonics.
>> Instead, even with progress over specific problems, there's no general theory
>>--
>> or no general theory widely agreed upon.
>
> Having watched the field for almost 15 years now, I think the
> evolutionary psychology will become the underpinning for psychology.
> The lack of a major figure isn't fatal.  Plate tectonic doesn't have a
> Newton or Darwin figure associated with it.
>
> There is quite a list of major figures in the field.
>
> Keith
>
>> Of course, I'm merely echoing others on this and my knowledge of the current
>> state of the field is probably of no account.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Dan
>>
>>
>> From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
>> To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>> Sent: Sat, October 23, 2010 2:51:58 PM
>> Subject: Re: [ExI] Physics versus psychology
>>
>> 2010/10/23 John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>:
>>
>> snip
>>
>>> Doing really great work in
>>> psychology, work that ranks up there with Newton or Darwin or Einstein, is
>>> so incredibly difficult that nobody has managed to do any yet.
>>
>> I disagree on it being difficult, having done substantial work in this
>> area on the common origin of capture-bonding (Stockholm syndrome),
>> battered wife syndrome, military basic training and hazing.  Also on
>> the common origin of drug addiction and cult addiction.  On this very
>> mailing list I analyzed the genetic basis of a model for the origins
>> of both religions and wars as well as a previous journal article on
>> the subject.
>>
>> I would venture to guess that fewer than one in ten of the list
>> readers have even read the journal articles.
>>
>> Of course, such work is throughly politically incorrect and thus not
>> widely accepted, not even here.
>>
>> Keith
>
>
>
>
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