[ExI] Evolutionary psychology and recent selection was trump

Dan TheBookMan danust2012 at gmail.com
Wed Jun 8 03:53:26 UTC 2016


On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 8:10 PM, Stephen Van Sickle <sjv2006 at gmail.com>
wrote:
>>  70 years ago Germany and Japan were the most militaristic countries
>> in the world, now they may be the least militaristic.
>
> Too early to tell.

I wouldn't put much stock in that either. Post-WW2, both those nations were
occupied and the postwar world was very different -- going from a
multipolar world to a bipolar one (and now to a unipolar one or is that
over?).

By the way, what's the measure of militarism here? I'm not saying the
governments of Germany and Japan prior and during WW2 were not
militaristic. They definitely were, though the governments that defeated
Germany in both wars and Japan in WW2 were also fairly militaristic. The
US, UK, France, the Russian Empire (and then then Soviet Union*) were no
strangers to war.

Also, I'm not sure we have a good handle here whether this is under genetic
control and that these wars had that specific impact. Certainly, that
Germany lost many soldiers in WW1, then started an even bigger war two
decades later might tell against it, no? At least, prima facie.

Regards,

Dan
  See my latest Kindle book, "The Late Mr. Gurlitt," at:
http://mybook.to/Gurlitt

* Think Russian Civil War. That alone should tell us something.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20160607/34d033c5/attachment.html>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list