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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 o

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 Certain eunuchs gained immense power that occasionally superseded that of prime ministers.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.

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.