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> natural state of man why on earth would you assume a static natural state given what we know about evolution?

by 3minus1 13y ago

dllthomas 13y ago
I agree that an assumption of some kind of context-free "natural state" is silly, but I don't think it's what we know about evolution that motivates this. Evolution "says" there probably aren't purely genetic complex differences between people, and that's probably true over long time scales in terms of human history.
- mtdewcmu 13y ago
  I didn't mean my reference to a natural state to be taken so literally. In this kind of literature, you see lots of references to the Hobbesian jungle, but I don't think many people think it's a scientific concept to be taken literally.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    Yeah, that probably came off a little harsher than I meant it.
mtdewcmu 13y ago
Evolutionary psychology is one of my pet peeves. The notion that evolution determines complex human behaviors like corruption presupposes that humans are guided to a large extent by instinct. What else is a genetically-coded behavior, if not an instinct? You have to accept a world where people think they are selecting a course of action based on situations, but, actually, our orders come silently through instinct, whispering in our ear, calling all the shots, enlisting us to concoct situation-based fictions to cover the tracks. Instinct exists in animals, for sure, but we aren't very close to working out the mechanisms for how genes code for proteins that code for behaviors. How to make a protein that encodes bribery is way beyond our knowledge. I don't think there's any doubt that humans can do things that are not literally written into DNA, so why create such a large role for instinct, which we have almost no understanding of? I think corruption comes from disorder, which is the form things take by default. Self-seeking doesn't need an explanation, because everyone needs to take care of themselves just to exist. People looking out for themselves is an invariant, what varies is how they go about it.

> natural state of man why on earth would you assume a static natural state given what we know about evolution?

by 3minus1 13y ago

> natural state of man why on earth would you assume a static natural state given what we know about evolution?

I agree that an assumption of some kind of context-free "natural state" is silly, but I don't think it's what we know about evolution that motivates this. Evolution "says" there probably aren't purely genetic complex differences between people, and that's probably true over long time scales in terms of human history.

mtdewcmu 13y ago
I didn't mean my reference to a natural state to be taken so literally. In this kind of literature, you see lots of references to the Hobbesian jungle, but I don't think many people think it's a scientific concept to be taken literally.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  Yeah, that probably came off a little harsher than I meant it.

mtdewcmu 13y ago

Evolutionary psychology is one of my pet peeves. The notion that evolution determines complex human behaviors like corruption presupposes that humans are guided to a large extent by instinct. What else is a genetically-coded behavior, if not an instinct? You have to accept a world where people think they are selecting a course of action based on situations, but, actually, our orders come silently through instinct, whispering in our ear, calling all the shots, enlisting us to concoct situation-based fictions to cover the tracks. Instinct exists in animals, for sure, but we aren't very close to working out the mechanisms for how genes code for proteins that code for behaviors. How to make a protein that encodes bribery is way beyond our knowledge. I don't think there's any doubt that humans can do things that are not literally written into DNA, so why create such a large role for instinct, which we have almost no understanding of? I think corruption comes from disorder, which is the form things take by default. Self-seeking doesn't need an explanation, because everyone needs to take care of themselves just to exist. People looking out for themselves is an invariant, what varies is how they go about it.