[Paleopsych] demons

[Geraldine Reinhardt]

Alice, Geoffrey Miller's piece is exceptional.

>>More subtley, because mating is a social game in which the attractiveness of a behavior depends on how many other people are already producing that behavior, political ideology evolves under the unstable dynamics of game theory, not as a process of simple optimization given a set of self-interests.  This explains why an entire student body at an American university can suddenly act as if they care deeply about the political fate of a country that they virtually ignored the year before.  The courtship arena simply shifted, capriciously, from one political issue to another, but once a sufficient number of students decided that attitudes towards apartheid were the acid test for whether one's heart was in the right place, it became impossible for anyone else to be apathetic about apartheid.  This is called frequency-dependent selection in biology, and it is a hallmark of sexual selection processes.  >>

I often wonder why an entire student body grabs a social issue that shortly before was not considered of interest to others on campus.  With our upcoming election the majority of college students are siding with Kerry probably because he protested the Viet Nam war after he had won his medals including three purple hearts.  It could be "a hallmark of sexual selection processes" as Geoffrey Miller suggests or it could be the effects of a collective consciousness in action.

Thanks again for "Political Peacocks".

Gerry 

Gerry Reinhart-Waller
Independent Scholar
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Alice Andrews 
  To: The new improved paleopsych list 
  Sent: Monday, November 01, 2004 11:20 AM
  Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] demons


  Lynn! Thank you for such kind words re the beginning of my 'Evolutionary Mind' piece..."Mouth-watering" makes me want to keep on with it! So thanks...
  All best,
  Alice

  ps If you've never seen, you may enjoy Geoffrey Miller's "Political Peacock's"

  http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/political_peacocks.htm



    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. 
    To: The new improved paleopsych list 
    Sent: Monday, November 01, 2004 11:12 AM
    Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] demons


    Alice, sounds like you have a fascinating manuscript in the works! What you have sent is really mouth-watering. 

    Alice may be onto something here. They do see themselves as underdogs. This justifies the more radical responses. Of course, since the days of LBJ in the Senate (see Master of the Senate by Caro), the Dems have enjoyed a majority, basically until mid-Clinton. During the the LBJ presidency and the 70s the left was clearly ascendent. Now they seem to be diminishing, and demographics seem to portend nothing but trouble for the Left.

    I recall my hippy friends in the late 60s saying 'when the revolution comes' and I always wondered why we would revolt, since I thought we had the greatest country in the world by far. I thought, "Oh, oh, If the revolution comes, I will have to fight my own friends."  Even then there was a deep streak of hate and violence. Tom Hayden clearly wanted people to die in Chicago in 68. I wonder if it isn't also the notion that 'the system is rotten' and therefore one is justified in violence, lies, and any other mechanism. My own experience with the Left in the 60s left me wondering what they were thinking and why they were so angry. I think it is the Marxist underpinnings. Paul Johnson's Intellectuals helped me see the personal life of Marx and how it corrupted his political views. 

    Thanks for the food for thought!
    Lynn

    Alice Andrews wrote:

      Hi Lynn,


      >What is it about the Left that makes them so hateful?  





----------------------------------------------------------------------------


    _______________________________________________
    paleopsych mailing list
    paleopsych at paleopsych.org
    http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  paleopsych mailing list
  paleopsych at paleopsych.org
  http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/paleopsych/attachments/20041101/f6bcf0d6/attachment.html>