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> Because we have repro­ductive independence, and we get maximum Darwinian fitness by looking after our own survival and having our own offspring. i.e. we are

• mlLK 18y ago
  ya except moving past something like free-markets is a fantasy in itself; power begets greed. imho, given the 2% that control 1/2 the worlds wealth it is that 98% moral objective to destroy that 2% and redistribute the wealth accordingly via the battleground known as the free-market.
• nostrademons 18y ago
  Selfish, greedy, unrelated, and fertile. E.O. Wilson's point was that since each worker ant is closely related to the rest of the colony, and they can't reproduce themselves, it's in the best interest of their genes to look out for the colony. We could get a similar effect by sterilizing humans (perhaps this is why monarchies have used eunuchs as their closest advisors and attendants), but I don't think it'd go over well. Ants are selfish and greedy too, when it comes to warfare between colonies.
  • mechanical_fish 18y ago
    Unfortunately for your eunuch idea, the part of your anatomy that makes you think and act like a genetically independent agent is much more problematic to cut off. The flip side is that human reason and imagination are powerful enough to be able to model socialist societies fairly well. You can actually build an army, or a Shaker community, out of genetically unrelated humans, which is more than you can say for, e.g., cats. But human large-scale social altruism is dependent on culture, law, ethics, and reason, which makes it much more unstable than the ant version.
    • nostrademons 18y ago
      Not necessarily. Most of the aggression centers in the brain are triggered by testosterone. Cut off the testes, and testosterone levels drop dramatically. Similarly, experiments that injected testosterone found that they could "manufacture" aggression in normally mild-mannered men (and women! that's one of the side-effects of steroid use in female athtletes). Also, Shakers were celibate, which is perhaps more evidence for a connection between reproduction and aggression.
      • mnemonicsloth 18y ago
        The facts are against you, dude. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch#China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch#China > At the end of the Ming Dynasty there were about 70,000 eunuchs ... Certain eunuchs gained immense power that occasionally superseded that of prime ministers. The Wikipedia article goes on to make a few mistakes by suggesting that Eunuchs were the Emperors' henchmen, and doesn't mention the fact that several of the Ming emperors were in fact deposed, and more were politically neutered (hur hur) by palace eunuchs. In other words, despite a total lack of testosterone, the eunuchs' behavior was still generally aggressive and status-seeking. That makes a certain amount of sense, given the prevailing "design philosophy" [1] of evolved systems. Natural selection only produces incremental improvements, which means there are lots of little widgets doing similar things that are glued on in a half-random way. Self-interest and aggression are central to human behavior, so it seems silly to think --like alchemists who wanted to bottle essences like "heat" or "perfection"-- that all aggressive and self-interested behavior would disappear in the absence of one hormone. [1] Creationism is bad, but sometimes its terms are handy.
      • netcan 18y ago
        I think you were being sarcastic. But I think you put your finger on a fundamental mistake people seem to instintively make when drawing conclusions from any evolutionary concepts. Jumping from 'do' to 'should do', 'will do', etc. For castration to have an effect on genetics, you'd need it'd need to be universal for hundreds, thousands or preferably, millions of generations. To affect memes it could happen within a few generations, but the science on that is a lot weaker.
• mseebach 18y ago
  The free market is modelled around the fact that we are greedy. Communism assumes that we are (or can be made) purely altruistic ("From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" collapses if there is just a single selfish, greedy actor present). That's why free markets work remarkably better than communism.
  • walterk 18y ago
    Thankfully, however, we're not actually forced to choose between laissez-faire capitalism and communism.
    • unalone 18y ago
      Yeah. I know neither side thinks compromise is a good solution, but: considering that each extreme is half the world's nightmare, being somewhere in between is a good way of giving everybody a chance to alter things. I think that being black-and-white in terms of your personal self is always a good way to be: if you always try to do the right thing for yourself regardless of what other people choose, then you're to be completely respected. But people who take that attitude and then try to cast it over an entire society (like Ron Paul, or Ayn Rand - though I think that the latter didn't actually think an entire society could work like that) ignore how incredibly complex any collection of people becomes, and how disastrous a black-and-white worldview would become.
      • mseebach 18y ago
        There is a considerable span between free markets and laissez-faire capitalism. Most modern "left" political movements accept free markets as a good thing, and mainly differ with the right on the level of regulation. I mainly read Ayn Rand as a criticism of the "truths" of the left wing, not as a very useful proponent of a laissez-faire society. Anyway, free markets "punish" greed, by forcing those who want material wealth to work for it, instead of leeching of others. The reason taxation and politicians is a problem in free markets is exactly greed: anybody on the receiving end of public funds have little rational motive to seek to end that stream.