Evolution and why Humanity Fails at it:
Yeah, look, while evolution is true, we suck at it, understanding it, and applying it. I say again, people are bastards. This has lead to Eugenics, genocide, "social darwinism" ( aka: "I'm justified in screwing you over"). We take "only the strongest will survive," to absurdity in order to "justify" our basest impulses. Ask men to achieve anything, love, hate, perversion, revenge, the murder of an entire continent, anything at all except respecting themselves and others and they will do so. Evolutionary theories provide a way to paint ourselves and our failings as "natural" and we love it for that. Just as we loved killing "in the name of God(s)...." (What's even sadder is that multiculturalism is guilty of this too, but in reverse)
Like most of psychology, biology and other evolutionary views, it also really doesn't address the human condition in ways it really should.... According to this incomplete theory, I am a dead end who cannot influence the gene pool as I will never pass on my own genes. In its haste to achieve superiority at all costs, Evolutionary Theories tried to separate "nature and nurture:" this is a fallacy. While I will never procreate, I most certainly can influence the gene pool, by helping children. My helping them both shapes those who will reproduce and increases their chances of doing so.... It doesn't involve a single shred of passing my DNA down either.
Foresight is only as far as you can peer into the past. Unfortunately one of science's greatest strengths is also one of its greatest flaws, it only looks forward and never back. If it did, it might have kept from making some of its greatest mistakes.
Well, Evolutionaries Theories do take in account the fact that the best way to pass on your gene may be not to procreate yourself but helps other's kids. That's the mechanism behing ants for exemple.
Honestly, I think you're missing the point: Evolution is quite a complete theory, and science is perfectly able to look backward too (How could we do paleontology otherwise?) but no matter what Science says, it should bears no weight on our morale code. What's natural isn't good or bad, it's natural and that's it.
False. The principal behind ants is that they do pass on their (nearly identical) genes, its just not every ant does so. Same genes though. The difference here is that those ants are all RELATED BY DIRECT BLOOD. I have no relationship beyond friendship with the people whose kids I support. I tend to avoid my family when possible. I believe my bloodline tends to suck, I'm selecting ones I favor above it. My bloodline should probably die. My knowledge should procreate.
Evolution and why Humanity Fails at it:
Yeah, look, while evolution is true, we suck at it, understanding it, and applying it. I say again, people are bastards. This has lead to Eugenics, genocide, "social darwinism" ( aka: "I'm justified in screwing you over"). We take "only the strongest will survive," to absurdity in order to "justify" our basest impulses. Ask men to achieve anything, love, hate, perversion, revenge, the murder of an entire continent, anything at all except respecting themselves and others and they will do so. Evolutionary theories provide a way to paint ourselves and our failings as "natural" and we love it for that. Just as we loved killing "in the name of God(s)...." (What's even sadder is that multiculturalism is guilty of this too, but in reverse)
Like most of psychology, biology and other evolutionary views, it also really doesn't address the human condition in ways it really should...
Completely shameless plug, Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust. It's perfect for your argument.
Wiki:
The stranger, because he cannot be controlled and ordered, is always the object of fear; he is the potential mugger, the person outside of society's borders who is constantly threatening. Bauman's most famous book, Modernity and the Holocaust, is an attempt to give a full account of the dangers of these kinds of fears. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno's books on totalitarianism and the Enlightenment, Bauman developed the argument that the Holocaust should not simply be considered to be an event in Jewish history, nor a regression to pre-modern barbarism. Rather, he argued, the Holocaust should be seen as deeply connected to modernity and its order-making efforts. Procedural rationality, the division of labour into smaller and smaller tasks, the taxonomic categorisation of different species, and the tendency to view rule-following as morally good all played their role in the Holocaust coming to pass. And he argued that for this reason modern societies have not fully taken on board the lessons of the Holocaust; it is generally viewed - to use Bauman's metaphor - like a picture hanging on a wall, offering few lessons. In Bauman's analysis the Jews became 'strangers' par excellence in Europe;[9] the Final Solution was pictured by him as an extreme example of the attempts made by societies to excise the uncomfortable and indeterminate elements existing within them. Bauman, like the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, contended that the same processes of exclusion that were at work in the Holocaust could, and to an extent do, still come into play today.
And he was right with say... the Khmer Rouge.
If we take progress within society to it's natural, modern, entirely extreme side of "progress" conclusions, we would end up with a world where we simply eliminate all dissidents, liquidate the mentally unstable and slow, purge emotions, destroy the very things that make us human in the first place.
This is why any extremism is intolerable, and we should make sure to maintain our sense of humanity as we progress forward.
Yes, very yes.
She actually NEVER decided what happened in any form. He did and it almost always ended badly.
I must admit I never saw the show and only read the wiki, but even from the clip you showed it's obvious she usually replies with "Mehh, shut up", every time he threatens her. That's not a devoted wife. That's an equal. In a stereotypical role, of course, but an equal nonetheless. She's not an Edith Bunker.
From the wiki and hence my interpretation, emphasis mine:
Alice (née Alice Gibson), [...] is Ralph's patient but sharp-tongued wife of roughly 15 years. She often finds herself bearing the brunt of Ralph's insults, which she returns with biting sarcasm. She is level headed, in contrast to Ralph's pattern of inventing various schemes to enhance his wealth or his pride; in each case, she sees the current one's unworkability, but he becomes angry and ignores her advice. (And by the end of the episode, her misgivings are almost always proven to have been well-founded.) She has grown accustomed to his empty threats
Meh, we're not going to get anywhere like this. I could say this is negligent or reckless of you, but really where would that get us?
You could, and it probably is. I'm liberal (read: egoistic/autistic/insensitive) like that, and get criticised for it in real life enough.
O she does tell him to shut up, and she's always summarily ignored because she's female. She knows this and complains about it, but meh, "women complain about everything." She also never takes any action to stop what she KNOWS and has repeatedly proven, is his latest hair brained scheme, but only picks up the pieces after. She never stops him as that isn't "a woman's place." She absolutely is devoted, because she never leaves his stupid ass, despite him slowly ruining both their lives and thinking it's cool to threaten to hit her. "Stand by your man."
All I'd say to her is that before you assume a man who's talking condescendingly to a woman is sexist, you should see how that man talks to other men. Need I say more?
I think you need to read the article harder, bro, and stop talking before you've checked your reading comprehension.
Do any of them display that delightful mixture of privilege and ignorance that leads to condescending, inaccurate explanations, delivered with the rock-solid conviction of rightness and that slimy certainty that of course he is right, because he is the man in this conversation?
This is talking about instances in which the man treats dudes with respect and women like they Just Don't Get It.
I.e., it invalidates that case you're talking about, need you say more.
Jegus.
As far as I can tell, the only criteria she would use to identify said "delightful mixture" is the fact that the guy comes off as condescending. All I'm saying is, if a guy acts like a condescending dick to a woman, you should first make sure he's not just an all around condescending dick, before concluding that he's a sexist. A lot of people like to feel smart, and since people generally base their self-worth off comparison to others, a great way to feel smart is to talk down to other people. If it's only women that he consistently talks down to, then you've got something to go on. If you just dismiss everything a man says as sexism just because he come off rude, that's almost as ignorant as you're accusing him of being.
Basically, it's back to that giving-people-the-benefit-of-the-doubt I was talking about earlier.
According to this incomplete theory, I am a dead end who cannot influence the gene pool as I will never pass on my own genes. In its haste to achieve superiority at all costs, Evolutionary Theories tried to separate "nature and nurture:" this is a fallacy. While I will never procreate, I most certainly can influence the gene pool, by helping children. My helping them both shapes those who will reproduce and increases their chances of doing so.... It doesn't involve a single shred of passing my DNA down either.
I've definitely seen evolutionary discussion of things like that. The first thing that comes to mind is some speculation (I don't know if it's more than that) that humans have such a long post-fertility lifespan because having old people around was helpful for raising kids and passing on knowledge, thus leading to something kind of resembling group selection. In any case, the point of evolutionary theory is that natural selection is an arbiter of what is the best at reproducing itself, and no more. It's kinda tautological in that sense. It's certainly not an arbiter of what's more valuable. If it were, the Social Darwinists would have been right. I mean, I'm crazy about evolutionary theory, but I may well decide to adopt kids instead of having my own, because I figure instead of making more resource-sucking humans, I can instead reduce the number of orphaned, homeless humans. If evolution imparted moral value, that would be a patently absurd decision. Luckily, it doesn't.
Sheb: Yeah, this thread isn't the place for it and I don't feel like getting into it much, but a few good books to get to know EP are "The Moral Animal" and "How the Mind Works." Some good papers would be Cosmides and Tooby's stuff on cheater detection modules, and a collection of papers I referenced a bunch in my senior thesis, whose names I can't recall at the moment, but they were attempting to explore evolutionary sensible alternatives to a theory which posited that behavioral changes following exposure to death-related stimuli were due to attempts to cope with an (inherently unobservable, evolutionary nonsensical) existential fear. The evolutionary hypothesis was that if threatening prompts other than death could elicit the same effects (which included increased in-group bias) then a more likely scenario was that people respond to threats by becoming more attached to groups they belong to. Then "The Origins of Virtue" is a great one by Matt Ridley. I'm pretty rusty on all this psych stuff since I've been out of the game for a couple years now...reminds me that once I get into grad school I'm going to have to beef up again :\
As for the "making up ridiculous stories," well yeah. I'm sure you know the blonde thing was satire; but even that is "science" in that it presents falsifiable propositions. Psychology as a whole has to deal with a lot of wacky theories and crackpots (see: Freud still being considered an authority today) and I think it's because while it takes a very specific kind of person to get excited about quarks and photons, basically everybody is interested in the human mind, and it seems so much more accessible that people are pretty eager to jump in and think they've figured everything out. Applying the good old scientific method is still the way to go.
On the McDonald's beating, once again psychology can shed a little light. The "bystander effect", and diffusion of responsibility, which a lot of people have heard of even outside psychology, describes the inverse relationship between the number of people witnessing some event which seems to require intervention, and the likelihood that any person will actually help. The classic case is a woman who was noisily murdered over some ridiculous extended period of time in the courtyard of a big apartment building. Apparently, everyone who heard the screams rationalized that if it were something worth getting worried about, other people would be panicking. As a lifelong city denizen, I know exactly how this goes. Loud gunshot-sounding noises, sirens, screams, and other shady shit is so commonplace that you don't even go to look at it unless other people cue you to first.
So again, giving people the benefit of the doubt, we don't have to conclude that people are bigoted because they see a trans person getting beaten and don't help. Past observation shows that no matter who was getting beaten, it's very likely that out of a large crowd of people, nobody would do anything. And of course, if just one person happened to witness it, there's a very good chance they would do something. Weird stuff.
Or maybe old age is just something that doesn't fit into evolutionary theories? Maybe the human body just couldn't manage to be alive, much less fertile, forever? Maybe there is no advantage but it's the best that could happen in a screwed up universe subject to entropy? Other than that, survival value isn't objective or subject to ranking, it is a threshold, once and if you get over it, you're good enough. Except of course in terms of competition where another alternative crowds you out,
in a given set of circumstances and point in time. I've seen very well written papers stating that if the average world temperature was about 15 degrees colder, Neanderthals, not us, could've been dominant. Are we, without technology, "fitter" under natural selection? Only because it didn't get a little colder? Replace the temperature variable with "need to run faster, be physically stronger, stealthier, more resistant to disease or pioson, etc etc etc." Simply, we have no idea and can't know what "fittest" is and conversely,
maybe the least specialized and most flexible/adaptable, wins....As for the bystander effect, I just can't help but hear justification for doing nothing in that.... Granted, it doesn't mean the observers are bias against her for being trans, but the attackers sure are.... I just find it interesting that NONE OF THEM CALLED THE POLICE OR EMERGENCY MEDICAL AFTER it happened. This is odd to me because there was a helpless person clearly having a seizure on the floor and her attackers had fled.... Thus the restraints of the "bystander" effect were substantially removed and still it was only the old woman who called.... What does this mean? Beyond my being sickened, I don't know, but it isn't good. Most Americans today have a cell phone, if you come across someone helplessly having a seizure on the ground in public, use it.
Evolution theory is like my job, or democracy, or capitalism, or Amsterdam: It sucks, but right now, there's no better alternative.
Meh, evolution just plain suck. Men didn't invent the car by bashing random pieces of metal and taking those who rolled the most.
Evolution is : thing will get acceptable because unaceptable things die. Those who advocate evolution as a way to regulate market are morons : Evolution doesn't care if a specie die, doesn't have any sense of purpose or any pity. And actually never guarantee that the system will go on. Without intelligent design brought by men, all life will die in a few billion year (quite possibly sooner).
Again, yes, very yes, which leads into:
Except artificial selection runs on the same principles as natural selection. The only real difference is that in artificial selection the blind hand of fate is replaced with a person, who changes the criteria of 'fittest'. Thus, artificial selection is still about the survival of the 'fittest', only that the criteria for 'fittest' is based upon the desires of the person.
Not nearly. Artificial selection is coupled with either selective cross breeding and in this case design. The result is as far as natural selection as you can get.Not at all the same dynamic. Just check the different breed of dogs that man did in a few centuries, and the different kind of wolves. Not the same result, not the same mechanics, and not the same dynamic.
The false presumption that natural and artificial selection have anything to do with one another is just kind of a justification for the crap we do today as being "natural." Bullshit
Example 1: Toy dog breeds. Lap dogs used to be wolves.... Then we got ahold of them.... Then we told them who they could and couldn't date/have puppies with:
Progress? The look on his face says "I'm a snack and look they even put me in a wrapper! It's to keep your food from getting cold! Brrrr it's not working!"
That thing's ancestors used to be wolves and we made it into, basically a rat that needs a sweater. That thing isn't gonna make it outside your living room ten minutes without people saving it. Survival of the fittest? Natural and artificial selection the same thing? I'm sorry Mr. Fluffles. God am I sorry.... Our sins against your entire family line will never wash off....
Example 2: Cars and in fact most products. Screw the long term I want my profits now! I will foist off the biggest piece of crap on you that I can foist onto you and by the time you realize what I've done, I already have your money and screw you. You can sit on hold with "customer care" (Ba Hahahahahahahahahhahahahahhahaha *20 minutes later* hahahahahahaha) for as long as I feel like while
I a recording tells you I care about your call but refuse to hire people to take it! "I'll just go to your competition...." You do that slappy. What do you think they're doing? That's right, same thing, because we the cheats have underbid and undercut all the legit businessmen long ago and now you're stuck with our crap. You only have yourself to blame because you wanted everything "cheaper" and that's exactly what you got, in price and quality....
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Topic: Chill and Relaxed Progressive Irritation and Annoyance Thread (Read 876930 times)