[lbo-talk] was Weath Distribution and hot air something

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Sun Apr 29 01:10:18 PDT 2007


Miles

"How can this be? If evolution "ceases" when a species shapes its environment, then evolution has stopped for beavers, birds, wild cats, spiders, ants, etc."

No, they don't shape their environment, because they don't create a mental picture of how they want to change it before they do. Once people introduced reason into their relationship with nature, they introduced a principle of change that was much more rapid than the leisurely pace of natural selection. So, for example, over around a hundred years, people put something like twenty years onto their life expectancy. That could not have happened through natural selection. It could only happen through the impact of human industry onto human development.

Similarly, if you look at the take-off in population, you will see that the biological existence of the majority of the species is a consequence of that unnatural intervention of industry and agriculture. We have left evolution behind.

Jerry Monaco 'what ever concepts are they are probably implicit in our brain'. No. Then they would not be concepts, but instincts.

"Yes, I mean mental structures, including the power to reason. Chimps reason."

No. I think you mean Chimps do something that by a bad analogy zoologists call reason. And that is because the zoologists do not understand reason.

' the ability to reason and make coalitions? Read de Waal's "Chimpanzee Politics".'

Forgive me, but there just is not time. Still, I am sure that the title is an analogy, and a bad one, Chimpanzees don't have politics (let's face it, neither did humans until the Athenian democracy).

'all the capacity for empathy and the ability to understand the trade offs of helpfulness, cooperation, competition. ... are exhibited by our closest relatives the bonobos and the chimpanzees'

No, that is wrong. You are using the terms "trade offs, helpfulness, cooperation, competition, empathy" in a way that is trying to blur over the difference between Chimpanzee actions (I hesitate to say 'behaviour') and human behaviour. Whatever Chimps are doing, it is only "competition" by analogy to human behaviour. After all, competition did not really become a common human characteristic until some time in the eighteenth century.

When I see a Bonobo trading on the US Stock Exchange, sending a donation to Greenpeace, or organising an election campaign, then I'll change my mind.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list