[ExI] We are all feral

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Sun Jan 16 18:33:48 UTC 2011


On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 5:00 AM,  Alan Brooks
<alaneugenebrooks52 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 1:19 PM, Stathis Papaioannou? wrote:
>> He's psychotic, probably schizophrenic. He should have been treated.

You are probably right on both counts.  Schizophrenia seems likely to
be objectively measured by the load of HERV-W that the Jerad was
producing.  His reactivation of HERV-W (which we all carry at specific
addresses on chromosomes 6 and 7) was probably due to some infection
he got shortly before his symptoms started showing up in high school.
There is a list of such infections.  Chances are fair we could even
figure out which one it was.

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity-virus/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=

It's a lot of insight into MS and Schizophrenia, even bipolar.

The well known transhumanist Kennita Watson has MS, which is one of
the other ways HERV-W reactivation can affect people.  She thinks it
can be traced to a bad virus infection she had at MIT.

> Don't be so sure until we can read the examination reports; perhaps he is not psychotic, or maybe he is borderline; it could be he wanted to be famous-- which is being 'crazy like a fox'.

That's largely the conclusion that the Secret Service came to with
this study of the people who are involved in assassination or attempt
it.

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/14/132909487/fame-through-assassination-a-secret-service-study

They also noted that at least half of the people they studied had
known mental health issues.  I.e., fame/attention is a very powerful
human motivation because of our evolutionary past--we are largely
descended from those who obtained enough fame in a small tribe to
reproduce better than most.

The modern distinction between good fame (Nobel prize) and bad fame
(serial killers) may not have been so different in stone age groups
where typically 25% of males died by violence.  If you loose the
distinction and take the absolute value of fame, the people you list
below are probably more famous than all but a handful of Nobel Prize
winners.

> Was Tim McVeigh a psychotic, or was he also crazy like a fox? Or Son Of Sam, Mark David Chapman. Notice how they appeared psychotic at first but copped guilty (Berkowitz, Chapman) pleas or were found to be sane enough for trial. Even the wild Christian-rapist character who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart was found guilty!

Without some objective measure like the HERV-W load and brain
inflammation I could not say.  There are other modes, such as
activating the psychological mechanisms of war, where humans can
become violent.  They are the result of evolutionary selection in the
stone age.

Legal rulings do not always reflect the underlying reality as anyone
who has followed my adventures might note.

> Frankly, I don't think psychiatry is much more of a science than economics, sociology, political 'science', etc. Societal and professional biases are too prevalent.

There is considerable agreement to your opinion of these fields, even
by the practitioners.

"Christopher Badcock (sociologist, Freudian psychologist). told Fathom
that the insights that the social sciences once had into human
behaviour are now defunct. He argues that the burgeoning discipline of
evolutionary psychology, with its potentially unique combination of
genetics, neuroscience, psychology and other disciplines, is the only
realistic path to take toward understanding human nature."

snip

Badcock: It seems to me that if you want to explain human behaviour,
it has to be an interdisciplinary thing. Human behaviour is complex
and has multifarious causes, and if you limit yourself to one
particular academic specialty you are likely to have rather limited
insights.

http://www.fathom.com/feature/35533/index.html

I have contributed a little myself, there being so much low hanging
fruit in evolutionary psychology.

Keith




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