[ExI] Stone age intuition was medical power of attorney

[Tara Maya]

> On Dec 10, 2014, at 3:43 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thankfully, we do have other motivations.  We, alone, of all species, can attend to the quality of our lives and those of our children and even strangers.  But we do so at the cost of having fewer people with our genes.


But how did we get this way? These values we have had to have been selected for. I think you are making the same mistake as the Social Darwinists (though to reject their goals) of assuming that selection always favors the short term winners. Altruism itself, humor, compassion, passion for intellectual puzzles, art and science, all the things that people think of as human and not beast, all these things were selected for — and continue to be selected for in human mating. The three things both men and women, across many nations, said they were looking for in a spouse were: Compassion, Intelligence, and Humor. (For short term flings, men looked first for youth/beauty and women for power/money.) These are not detriments to selection. They are advantages. And I believe the same applies to children. Over the long haul, over many generations, having fewer but more compassionate, intelligent and fun children is what pays off… because those are the kind of people other people of our species want to be around.

With over 6 billion people on the planet, there are obviously plenty of social niches for countercultural strategies, and we see these. But it’s not the dominant human strategy in any human society.

Tara Maya
Blog <http://taramayastales.blogspot.com/>  |  Twitter <https://twitter.com/taramayastales>  |  Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Unfinished-Song-Epic-Fantasy/310271375658211?ref=hl>  |  Amazon <http://www.amazon.com/Tara-Maya/e/B004HAI038/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1349796143&sr=8-2-ent>  |  Goodreads <http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2951879.Tara_Maya>


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