it feels like a saturday

[lauralh]

I think this is because we went out late and woke up early. Also because Steve called in sick, so he's hanging around.

Talked a bit to joelgrus last night, who reminded me that I wanted to write about a little about my thoughts on sociobiology. So I did.

edit: If you aren't reading Pamie, well, why not? She's been updating fairly frequently, and today's entry cracked me up.

Comments

[fragmentchild.livejournal.com]

In regards to the sociobiology essay.. there are several problems with reducing everything to sexual selection. First of all, monogamy -- historically, monogamy has been in and out of favor since the dawn of mankind. The switch to monogamy as the socially accepted standard or ideal or whatever is obviously detrimental to sexual selection. Second, religion -- similar issue, Western religions promote monogamy and condemn bearing children out of wedlock. Third, birth control, whether chemical or physiological, has been around for ages.

One could argue that since we are not generally conscious of the mechanism behind evolution and have our own agendas that are only kept in check by the society's need to evolve as a whole, that those things don't disprove anything. However, we're talking in terms of hundreds of generations here, if those things were not evolutionarily conducive to whatever direction that society tends to, they would not have lasted very long.

I mean, the theory appeals to me, but once you start reducing things like art to sexual selection, you might as well reduce everything to it, and that's when you start running into the problems above. My take on it is that evolution is a complex combination of different interwoven vectors that all make up the larger whole of what the society (of humans, wolves, fish, ants, whatever) 'wants.' This simultaneously validates the sexual selection theory as part of the equation, and easily explains religion etc. Anyway, my two cents.

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

1) Monogamy is the "norm" but there are many many studies that say that at least 25% of children are bastards (their mothers have sex with other men, then raise the children like they're the husbands). This is a pretty optimal situation as far as gene selection goes, because women can pick whomever they want to bear children for, while having good "providers" to take care of the children (while not necessarily passing on their genes). I mean, how many people actually marry one person when they hit puberty and stay with that one person for the rest of their life??

2) The only religion that condemns bearing children out of wedlock (if I read my Old Testament correctly) is Christianity. And guess what, it didn't really stop it 2000 years ago, 1500 years ago, 1000 years ago, or 500 years ago. And it doesn't stop it today. The reasons Christianity prevailed are a little more complex, but encouragement of bearing lots of children helped, I'll just say.

3) I don't actually believe that a "society" wants things; members of a society want things. I haven't actually read The Selfish Gene but I understand that the basic premise is that genes want to be propagated, and will do whatever they can to do that. Sometimes this involves creating a society, and so forth.

[fragmentchild.livejournal.com]

Well.. I'm guessing you meant all Judeo-Christian religions in general and not Christianity in particular, since OT predates Christianity by a few thousand years. Out of those, a good example would be Islam, which actually prosecutes bearing children out of wedlock rather aggresively (the Shariat calls for corporal punishment, and courts in fundamentalist Muslim countries are governed by the Shariat, so this is not just an academic point -- as you've probably heard, Nigerian courts recently sentenced several women to death for this, there's a bit of a public outcry going on).

However, my point wasn't that monogamy and religion stop anything or anyone, my point was that they are designed to stop certain things in a way that would be detrimental to sexual selection, and the fact that they were embraced and adopted by the society speaks against sexual selection as the end all be all of evolution.

As for the society 'wanting' things -- the society is made up of intelligent semi-autonomous agents (us), wouldn't that give it a greater degree of consciousness than humans, much like the arguably intelligent semi-autonomous agents in our brain (neurons) give us a greater degree of consciousness than the cells themselves have?

I haven't read The Selfish Gene either, just bits and pieces on the net, and a guy I used to work with was a huge Dawkins fan, so I sort of know the premise but should probably read it at some point..

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

As for the society 'wanting' things -- the society is made up of intelligent semi-autonomous agents (us), wouldn't that give it a greater degree of consciousness than humans, much like the arguably intelligent semi-autonomous agents in our brain (neurons) give us a greater degree of consciousness than the cells themselves have?

That sounds kinda like New Age crap to me. Especially as I believe humans are autonomous and intelligent, and neurons are pretty much neither.

I'm guessing you meant all Judeo-Christian religions in general and not Christianity in particular, since OT predates Christianity by a few thousand years.

What I meant here was Christianity, because Judaism as portrayed in the Old Testament never seems to have any problems with its men having sex with lots of girls...

Like I said it's not JUST sexual selection, it's also selection for traits that lead to actually surviving. Neglect not that part. There are many things about religions (like the whole "have lots of babies" and "kill people that disagree with you" things) that lead to people who believe in them to prosper, therefore passing on their genes despite silly rules about monogamy (which aren't really followed so well anyway).

And I do think that forming societies is one of these things that enables people to pass on their genes. Go back a million years: you live in a tribe, you meet more girls, you cooperate in hunting and war, ergo you are more likely to prosper and reproduce than solo hunter-gatherers.

[fragmentchild.livejournal.com]

Well, neurons make an unsupervised decision given some input criteria, I figure that defines them as intelligent agents, at least if you listen to the artificial intelligence academia. As for autonomy -- I find it hard to define any social animal as autonomous. But, to illustrate my whole point -- take wolves, for instance (this is an old theory of mine, I just recently got around to writing it down in a more or less coherent form, so bear with me).

Wolves have a very complex system of communication -- auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory, etc. This stems from the fact that they're a pack animal, and that they can not survive outside the pack -- wolves' typical prey is much larger than them. The communication system that they have evolved in order to serve the needs of the pack, which in turn serves the needs of the individuals within the pack. Then, you look at the species that branched out from the wolves, say coyotes, which are a less social animal, don't have the communication means that the wolves have, and are much less fragile as a species.

As for Judaism -- if memory serves, the Torah is only a part of the OT, Genesis through Deutoronomy, and then there is a number of other texts that define the rest of the religion, some of them being the rest of the OT, some of them having nothing to do with the OT. Honestly I don't know much about the finer points of it, but Judaism in and out of itself condemns premarital sex etc. more strictly than Christianity does.

I'm not sure if killing people that disagree with you leads to survival on individual level -- people tend to die in wars. It does, however, lead to the society surviving and expanding and in some cases evolving, so that seems to support my point.