Monday, June 13, 2005
When evolutionary explanations run amok.
Bob Harris:
I think natural selection must have greatly rewarded the ability to reassure oneself in a crisis with complete bullshit. It's not hard to see how: if two early hominids are both fleeing a large, faster predator from which there is no escape, and one of them is sincerely thinking "I'm gonna be OK, I'm gonna be OK, the gods are watching over me, I'm gonna be OK" and the other is thinking "AAIEE! I'm dinner! I'm an entree! AAIEE! I'M GONNA DIE!" it's not hard to guess which one will give up first and wind up getting dragged around by his entrails. Indeed, inventing reassuring bullshit may be humankind's keenest survival skill. And now that we are our own greatest predator, it will probably kill us all.
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The grain of truth to this may be larger than you think. Listen to that founding father of sociobiology Bob Trivers
"The particular sub-area that I'm interested in developing myself has to do with ...the very peculiar and counter-intuitive fact that humans in a variety of situations misrepresent reality to the conscious mind while keeping in the unconscious either a fully accurate, or in any case more accurate, view of that which they misrepresent to the conscious mind. That seems so counter-intuitive....after natural selection ground away for four billion years and produced these eyeballs capable of such subtlety—color, motion-detection, the details of granularity that we see—you would have perfected the organs for interpretation of reality such that they wouldn't systematically distort the information once it reaches you....
The function of this area of self-deception is intimately connected to deception of others...."
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/trivers04/trivers04_index.html
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"The particular sub-area that I'm interested in developing myself has to do with ...the very peculiar and counter-intuitive fact that humans in a variety of situations misrepresent reality to the conscious mind while keeping in the unconscious either a fully accurate, or in any case more accurate, view of that which they misrepresent to the conscious mind. That seems so counter-intuitive....after natural selection ground away for four billion years and produced these eyeballs capable of such subtlety—color, motion-detection, the details of granularity that we see—you would have perfected the organs for interpretation of reality such that they wouldn't systematically distort the information once it reaches you....
The function of this area of self-deception is intimately connected to deception of others...."
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/trivers04/trivers04_index.html
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