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'Basic human nature'is a phrase that assumes a lot of things. How would you characterise this phrase in more detail, as it pertains to this topic? And how wou
by triplesec 10y ago
'Basic human nature'is a phrase that assumes a lot of things. How would you characterise this phrase in more detail, as it pertains to this topic? And how would you justify such claims?
- trevyn 10y agoThe human drive to reproduce.
- omginternets 10y agoFirst-world countries with ready access to contraception are facing a birth deficit, which is being eased by immigration. Sex-drive is hard to stamp out. Actual reproduction, not so much.
- flukus 10y agoThe desire to breed is pretty hard wired, species die without it. Sex is only fun because it rewards our desire to breed.
- Retra 10y agoSex is fun irrespective of it causing breeding. They are evolutionarily linked, but the have no moral relationship within the human brain. The desire to have sex and the desire to have children are for most people, completely independent desires. And for what it's worth, humans have no obligations to our evolutionary past. "How we evolved" has no direct bearing on what we want (or 'are meant') to do with our lives. It only determines what we are circumstantially capable of. EDIT: Here's a nerdy analogy for you. There is a relationship between the "programmer's intent" and the "binary program". But that relation has no bearing whatsoever on the relationship between the "binary program" and the "runtime behavior" of that program. These are independent relationships analgous to the relationship between "evolution" to "individual" and "individual" to "individual desires." (The feed-back which would link these -- from "runtime behavior" to "programmer's intent" -- only happens when the programmer is working, long before you end up with the binary you have when you run the program. In fact, this feedback is only ever employed to generate a completely new binary, never to modify the prior one. Thus ensuring that they cannot be co-dependent relationships, and thus evolution has no ability to determine individual behavior past the point of your DNA being fixed at conception.)
- freehunter 10y agoYes, but many people have instinctual desires to produce children as well. Ever heard of the phrase "my biological clock is ticking"?
- Retra 10y agoI said the desire was independent, not non-existent. Did anybody here even read what I wrote?
- freehunter 10y agoI read it, I'm just not sure what the point was.
- flukus 10y agoThe desire to have sex is because it's enjoyable, it's enjoyable as a result of evolution.
- Retra 10y agoYet if you don't want to have sex, you don't have to, despite any evolutionary pressure to do so. So evolution is not a consideration when trying to determine whether you want to have sex.
- smallnamespace 10y agoEvolution certainly is relevant if you explicitly think about your own evolutionary origins and what strategies worked out for your ancestors, when deciding what to do yourself.
- Retra 10y agoMost of your ancestors were nothing like human.
- freehunter 10y agoBasic human nature is to further the species through population growth. It's literally the only thing that everyone can agree on as being "why we're here". Every instinct ingrained in every living creature is to produce offspring. Telling people to stop producing offspring goes against basic human nature, and requires a pretty educated populace in order to understand why they have to stop this instinctual process.
- fulafel 10y agoEurope and Russia have low birth rates. Population decline is not generally prevented by reproduction instincts.
- smallnamespace 10y agoYou're basically proposing to make consumables more expensive and to make reproduction more difficult and/or costly. Countries that experience high costs for food and essential consumables see significantly higher rates of social unrest, riots, and revolution [1]. Not to mention that being able to reproduce is a fundamental goal of all sexual reproducing organisms because of evolutionary selection. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-and-rising-food-prices-heightened-arab-spring/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...
- EGreg 10y agoInduced demand sir https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
- dispose13432 10y agoHow about eating? Do you think people in the 1600s had a great quality of life? It's the 20th century version of "let them eat cake".