[extropy-chat] evolution and adoption

Mark Walker mark at permanentend.org
Mon Dec 22 13:22:56 UTC 2003


----- Original Message -----
From: "Damien Broderick"

> I'm not sure how tongue in cheek this is, Mark. What's you've described
is,
> after all, exactly what wealthy people did in the 19th and early 20th, and
> indeed perhaps all the way back to the invention of hierachical power
> culture. Wet nurses, nannies, private tutors, boarding schools or their
> harsh equivalent; all these allowed the luckless wives of the rich to
> produce one child rapidly after another, many of them doomed to perish,
> without wasting time and effort on emotional support, bonding, etc--and
the
> wonderful result was that these warped kids proved just the right stuff
for
> going out and building empires, thus perpetuating the process. Until it
> stopped working. And now nations like the UK struggle to deal with the
> legacy bullshit embedded in the culture.
>
I certainly don't deny that this sort of thing happened, and it didn't
always happen with the rich.  Rousseau (who was not rich) had five children
with his mistress and gave them all up to orphanages, which was to subject
his children to even more appalling conditions that the rich foisted on
their children. My point simply is that since orphanages and adoption give
one's offspring a high probability of survival it seems to make evolutionary
sense to have as many children as possible and give them up to such
agencies. I agree with you that this is not necessarily a good thing, only
that it seems to make sense, evolutionarily speaking.

Mark

Mark Walker, PhD
Research Associate, Philosophy, Trinity College
University of Toronto
Room 214  Gerald Larkin Building
15 Devonshire Place
Toronto
M5S 1H8
www.permanentend.org






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