On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 9:38 AM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
> CB: This part - "we are evolving to become more compassionate and
> collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive." - Alan and Matthias
> correctly criticize as evidencing lack of understanding of evolution.
> The kindness is not "evolving" us now. We already have a natural
> tendency to kindness. We evolved kindness hundreds of thousands of
> years ago and it conferred fitness on us way back when. Kindness is
> human natural from long ago.
>
> This part - "his fellow social scientists are building the case that
> humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing,
> altruistic and compassionate traits." and the reference to vulnerable
> condition of the early humans being overcome by cooperation gets at a
> profound truth , countering social darwinist , bourgeois ideological
> myths about rugged individualism as human nature etc.
>
I'm not sure what it means to say that we have a "natural tendency to kindness." If it means that we have the ability to be kind, then we've always had evidence for that, which being that sometimes people are kind. If it's saying that kindness is natural and viciousness is not, well, that doesn't appear to be supported by the evidence, as evinced by the fact that sometimes people are vicious. Is it proposing a dichotomy between nature and nurture, like, nature is telling you to do one thing but nurture another? That model makes no logical sense.
With cognitive biases you can say that we have a tendency to go in one direction or because you can judge beliefs against external reality: the non-depressed tend to overstate their abilities, &c. What kind of baseline exists for behavior? Behavior can be compared to the evaluator's normative ideals, but what jerk says people are kinder than she'd like them to be?