[ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato)

[William Flynn Wallace]

If you guys like this sort of pondering, try Pinker's 'The Better Angels of
Our Nature', as masterful synthesis of evolution,morals and violence and
why the latter has declined so much.  billw


On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 12:25 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 2:08 AM,  Mirco Romanato <painlord2k at libero.it>
> wrote:
>
> snip
> >
> > I would more interested in researching if killing me would increase
> > your reproductive fitness or not both long and short term.
>
> It depends on the situation.  If times are good and you are not up
> against resource limits (such as food) then the risk of trying to kill
> others (who fight back) doesn't increase your reproductive fitness at
> all.  In fact, it may get you killed for nothing.
>
> On the other hand, if your tribe faces a resource crisis, then taking
> a horrible risk to kill the neighbors and take their resources may be
> a good trade off.  From the viewpoint of genes, even all the adults in
> the tribe being killed isn't a total disaster because humans usually
> consider the young women of a defeated tribe to be booty.  The winners
> make wives or extra wives out of them and the genes march on.
>
> I have talked here about the consequences of an inconsistent
> environment for years
>
> > If you want a pacific society, just build a society where killing cost
> > everyone too much to be able to afford it.
>
> That's a society where the population is not pushing the resource
> limits.  Low population growth and/or increasing the resource base
> will keep it that way.
>
> > If you want a free society, just build a society where taking freedom
> > from others would cost too much to anyone and everyone.
> >
> > In these cases you would be selecting against killers and slavers.
>
> These don't seem consistent.  A free society may need to be full of
> people who are willing and genetically predisposed to killing others
> under enough provocation.
>
> Keith
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20140412/1228d4e8/attachment.html>