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Nope. Most people will never care about someone else’s child the way they’ll care about their own flesh and blood.
by toasterlovin 6y ago
Nope. Most people will never care about someone else’s child the way they’ll care about their own flesh and blood.
- cmendel 6y ago[citation needed]
- haihaibye 6y ago“Daly and Wilson found stepparenthood is the strongest risk factor for child abuse ever identified..a stepparent is 40-100 times more likely to kill a young child, even when confounding factors— poverty, mother’s age, traits of people who tend to remarry—are taken into account" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816602.Homicide https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816602.Homicide
- cmendel 6y agoOkay? That doesn't really support toasterlovin's claim that: >Nope. Most people will never care about someone else’s child the way they’ll care about their own flesh and blood. Stepparenthood implies a myriad of confounding factors, not the least of which are, a) death of a parent or b) Divorce. Upon further investigation, the link you posted does not contain the quote you posted, nor does searching the quoted text show return any results on either DuckDuckGo or Google. It is possible that this is a typographical error. I do want to point that EvoPsych is a bit iffy as far as fields go. See [1] if you're curious. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology#Reception_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology#Recept...
- haihaibye 6y agoBeing 40-100 times less likely to kill a child is probably correlated with caring for them more. It was a quote from Pinker's how the mind works. The 'Daly and Wilson' referenced was what I linked to.
- toasterlovin 6y agoThe overwhelming majority of people opt to have their own children rather than adopt. It is not me who bears the burden of proof.
- cmendel 6y agoThat is an entirely different claim than the one that you made previously. >Nope. Most people will never care about someone else’s child the way they’ll care about their own flesh and blood. != >The overwhelming majority of people opt to have their own children rather than adopt. It is not me who bears the burden of proof.
- toasterlovin 6y agoIt’s not completely unrelated. It’s just not exactly the same. But I’m not sure what to tell you, since you seem to have no real understanding of basic human nature. You should talk to people about how they feel about other people’s kids. It will be illuminating for you.
- cmendel 6y agoAd hominem attacks seem to be a disproportionate response to pointing out your inconsistency.
- toasterlovin 6y agoYou’re doing the equivalent of asking me to provide evidence that the sky is blue. We are biological organisms who are capable of recognizing our young. There is no plausible way that we could have evolved to not prefer our own children over others. If your stance is that we don’t have such a preference, you need to provide the evidence, because you are the one taking the outlandish position.
- sershe 6y agoDoesn't that mean that having children is basically selfish?
- toasterlovin 6y agoIt’s selfish in the same way that not giving away most of your lifetime earnings to a stranger is selfish. You could call that selfish, but you’d be in scarce company.
- sershe 6y agoThis analogy is false, it's nothing like that at all. Giving or not giving up earnings is a massive change in your life. Having an adopted child or your own child is no change whatsoever other than some hormonal high for yourself; for the rest of the society/environment, adding a first world child is actually a negative. If you want a funny analogy, a better one would be giving $1000 to charity (adoption) or giving $500 to charity, setting $250 worth of coal on fire and using $250 to buy weed so you could feel good about that all (your own kid).
- toasterlovin 6y agoI'm not sure what to say. We are biological beings and, as such, we are the result of evolution. The vast majority of us prefer our close relatives and, especially, our children by definition. There is no other state of affairs that can obtain. If you want to argue that people who fall in line with this are selfish, then fine. But that is not typically how the word is used. It is typically used to denote people who act selfishly above and beyond the baseline level of preference that we all have for our relatives, friends, and other parochial relations.
- sershe 6y agoEvolution by this rather simplistic understanding also would drive (and does drive) people to usurp maximum resources for themselves and their progeny - so, to do everything from hoarding to nepotism, self-dealing and corruption - basically, the definition of selfishness. Usually, when pretending that child-rearing is not selfish (and IMO it's more selfish than paragliding or eating cake), people refer to making sacrifices towards the child; but that is satisfied by adoption.