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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Nov 30, 2015 - 02:55pm PT
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The great journey of human morality from Yahweh to Socrates to Aquinas to Kant rises far above the simple demands of evolutionary social need into a realm of complexity in which evolutionary demands or needs are often abandoned for the sake of what is perceived as a greater good. What is that greater good?
I generally agree that the various formulations of social morality and the perceived needs of individuals and groups within human societies can and often do stand outside the confines of evolutionary determinism. What I don't agree with is the statement above:
evolutionary demands or needs are often abandoned for the sake of what is perceived as a greater good.
I don't reckon that the etiology of "the greater good" includes any sort of abandonment of evolutionary demands as an embarkation point. Many of the current regimes of reigning goodness dreamt up and enumerated have done so without benefit of evolutionary knowledge whatsoever; at least not in the proper Darwinian sense.
Such systems of social ordering ,such as they are , were never merely a reaction to evolutionary determinism per se. Such systems like Marxism were the outgrowth of a few key individual's tortured analysis of history; and American/western Democracy the product of an amalgam of religious and philosophical precepts. These attempts at the transcendental greater good lacked a discernible evolutionary reference point ( Rousseau notwithstanding) in the development of their central ideas. Although there were notable influences, Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations leaps to mind. A key precept of Smith's thinking was of course that humans are intrinsically selfish and self-aggrandizing and therefore an economic system that takes this into account will therefore tend to operate to the advantage of all.
I suppose one could say there is a crude evolutionary determinism embedded in that precept. Along with the tooth and claw of Rousseau.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 30, 2015 - 05:56pm PT
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What is that greater good?
Kin selection
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Nov 30, 2015 - 06:50pm PT
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If the greater good is kin selection, how do you explain the preference for celibacy of historic Christianity and Buddhism?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 30, 2015 - 07:58pm PT
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Can't explain everything, Jan.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 30, 2015 - 08:34pm PT
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The real paradigm of evolution is that a mutation is only successful if it is benign or contributes to the survival and reproduction of the individual or the group.
ah, no, not even close... and a truly value laden statement...
mutations happen, in sexual reproduction, the randomness of egg and sperm meeting provides variation...
what happens next is that an organism might develop to term
might be delivered alive
might survive childhood
might reproduce, same random combinations...
any of the "mights" that don't happen mean that particular combination doesn't get into the gene pool...
on some occasion the "randomness" isn't necessarily there for determining the "mights"
mates might be choosy and of varying competence
there could be environmental pressures that systematically favor or penalize particular traits
it's just a roll of the dice... over and over again.
some Archaea doesn't wake up on a spring morning in the year 3.7 billion BCE and decide it's going to grow up to be a human...
The great journey of human morality from Yahweh to Socrates to Aquinas to Kant rises far above the simple demands of evolutionary social need into a realm of complexity in which evolutionary demands or needs are often abandoned for the sake of what is perceived as a greater good.
or else they just retold the tale, interpreting the social behaviors that evolved in terms of some, to them, understandable story...
but they didn't understand much...
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Nov 30, 2015 - 11:42pm PT
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I just heard Spencer Wells of the Genographic project say that each person has about 100 mutations not seen in their parents. 100 mutations per generation. I thought that was pretty amazing.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Good point moose, about having to wait a long time to know the evolutionary results of a human institution.
Still, blaming celibacy on homosexuality is a very limited explanation. For many it was the trade off for not marrying a guy 30 years older than yourself that your parents wanted you to, or being able to use your brain instead of doing hard field labor all your life. In return you benefitted the group by being free to live more idealistically than most, and have time to educate and nurse the sick or in many cases produce inspirational art for the community.
In other cases, it meant enough food for your group because you didn't reproduce. 20% of the male population in traditional Tibet were monks, and despite the difficult climate, there were never famines as in other parts of more populous Asia.
In social science we now talk about human agency as well as environmental constraints and random chance. We think that in very intelligent animals such as ourselves, multiple factors are important to our ongoing evolution, including our own choices. We seem to be less deterministic than some of the hard sciences folks.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., Biochemist and Author Science Set Free [ aka The Science Delusion] © 2012, London, England:
“My book’s called Science Set Free because I think science has got stuck. And it’s got stuck in several ways, but most importantly, it’s got stuck in what I call the Science Delusion, which is the belief that science has already answered the most fundamental questions in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in. This means there is a kind of arrogance, a dogmatism, in science, which really blocks off free inquiry.
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WBraun
climber
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You've been expose to way too much brainwashing.
Celibacy is free from all sex desire.
Homosexuality means not celibacy and equals failure in the renounced order and immediately expelled.
The minute a sanyasis falls down to sex desire he's finished and no more sanyasis.
To take sanyasis is very very difficult and is supposed to be practiced only by those who are very advanced.
In this day and age any nutcase will claim sanyasis and mislead those who are clueless.
And since you are clueless all you've seen is nutcases posing as sanyasis.
You've never seen nor heard of real sanyasis and they are very very rare.
Typical western brainwashed media knowledge is all you have .....
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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some Archaea doesn't wake up on a spring morning in the year 3.7 billion BCE and decide it's going to grow up to be a human...
Honestly, do you really think that’s what I was saying?
The great journey of human morality from Yahweh to Socrates to Aquinas to Kant rises far above the simple demands of evolutionary social need into a realm of complexity in which evolutionary demands or needs are often abandoned for the sake of what is perceived as a greater good.
or else they just retold the tale, interpreting the social behaviors that evolved in terms of some, to them, understandable story...
but they didn't understand much...
Easy to say Socrates or Kant is/was a dummy but it’s not particularly smart.
Let me try again:
Walking down the beach and finding a watch tells us something immediately: that watch did not occur there without human intervention as watches do not occur in nature as they are made by human beings as a product of mind.
If a watch were to be discovered by the Mars Rover we would know something immediately.
Watches simply do not occur by nature. As someone who didn’t understand much said along time ago “the art of shipbuilding is not in the wood.”
There is something in the creations of humanity that is different than what we find in the natural world. Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer use this as an idea in their art. So did the Egyptians and the Greeks. The human ability to detect archetypes within the aggregate chaos of nature in these ancient societies related to this phenomenon.
You can argue that the crab next to the watch is far more complicated or that a bacterium in the gut of the crab is even far more complicated than the watch, so complexity isn’t the issue. What remains is a structure that would not occur based on the nature of physics and the nature of the universe without the intersession of human mind.
Now you can argue that since humanity is a product of evolutionary processes the products of human mind are but a manifestation of evolutionary processes as well. I wouldn’t agree.
There is an interface between the natural world, what it is capable of creating by virtue of its own construction and rules and the products that are created by humanity, from the simplest Paleolithic tools, a scraper, to the Hadron Collider: we recognize the difference between what is “natural” and what is a human construction whether it’s a watch, a scraper or a moral dictate.
Creatures in the wild may experience empathy but they are not bound by moral duty, and there is a big difference in the same way that the kinds of machines that are uniquely human are not found pre-existing in the natural world.
That interface is human thought/mind and it manages a unique kind of creativity. To say that human morality is but a function of social cooperation predicated on evolution is like saying a watch is but the minerals that make up its metals. It misses the point by a mile.
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WBraun
climber
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Good job Paul, and you show such good intelligence that's so rare these days .....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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by the same argument, Paul, the French Academy of Science declared that bees could not build a bee hive because it required a knowledge of variational calculus to come up with the bee hive structure...
...bees do not have an understanding of variation calculus.
Therefore, bee hives are impossible (at least built by bees).
Humans tend to look at the world by a singularly human perspective... thus "god made man in his own image" is a not so remarkable declaration, it represents the "reverse engineering" ideas we all have...
man builds a watch,
we find a watch
some one must have built it.
Sounds perfectly reasonable... except there are "watches" all around us that "nature" built without any human intervention. One doesn't need the intervention of some "builder" to see how these natural "watches" are built.
The more interesting question raised by your discussion is how do you tell that something is recognizably "built"? It is the sort of question paleontologists ask when examining pebble tools... or other early stone age artifacts.
In the end, the watch you allude to is a product of nature, as humans are, and so it isn't at all "impossible" that it comes into existence in the universe... the trick is recognizing what a watch is.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Ed said"But interestingly, there are those here that seem to espouse that " in some aspect, knowledge is not possible, or that reality does not actually exist" which encompasses many of the objections to a scientific examination of the ideas that are the subject of this thread, in particular, "mind."
Oddly, this article referencing nihilism does come up at SEP:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nothingness/
which is an interesting historic view of our apparently favorite hobby horse, "nothing.""
This was in reference to Nihilism. you wouldn't be the first person to suggest Zen practioners of being nihilist's (you didn't actually say that). I still think it comes down to dualism. From a dualistic view point to say "I"s a construct is to say I doesn't exist. But ; from a non-dual point of view to say "I" is a construct is to also say "I" is everything and infinite.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Sounds perfectly reasonable... except there are "watches" all around us that "nature" built without any human intervention. One doesn't need the intervention of some "builder" to see how these natural "watches" are built.
The more interesting question raised by your discussion is how do you tell that something is recognizably "built"? It is the sort of question paleontologists ask when examining pebble tools... or other early stone age artifacts.
The point where you go wrong here is that there are natural watches. Constructions by human beings have a distinctive quality. Sentient creatures as well as nature by and large create constructions within which we see organization but that organization remains largely distinct from those things created by the human mind. Bee's nests, bird nests, crystals are you kidding?
If you find a printing press deep in the wilderness try and make the argument it's just a naturally occurring phenomenon. You wouldn't because it would be ridiculous. Yet you make the argument that morality, with a complexity far more rigorous and difficult than the construction of a printing press, is simply a natural product of evolution.
The human mind is the interface between nature and human creativity and in that is a very hard problem.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Granted DMT, that religious celibacy was often a cover for homosexuality and pedophilia too, apparently. And of course evolutionary group altruism also exists.
However, particularly in the case of women celibates / renunciants, positive human agency was also at work. This point was driven home to me in Nepal when I compared the life prospects of Buddhist women, for whom either a monastary or a hermetic life was a possibility and Hindu communities, where women had no agency and no choice other than an arranged marriage and endless child bearing or suicide.
Human agency within the larger picture of evolution is what Paul is getting at when he talks about the human mind being the bridge between nature and creativity.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jan, your insights from sociology/anthropology are appreciated, at least by me. I had never given much thought to the rationale behind religious celibacy.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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rationale behind religious celibacy.
Don't forget that celibacy , at least the version practiced by the Catholic Church, in large part avoided the numerous problems presented by family inheritance, primogeniture, and these types of issues. The Church of Peter wanted to avoid the profound problems associated with the messy marriage and trans-generational instability as practiced first in Imperial Rome and later in monarchical Europe.
This approach largely kept intact the sovereign hierarchy of the Pope and the centralized clerical authority required for a streamlined power structure based upon canonical directives and the smooth acquisition of Vatican wealth--- an internally unchallenged command and control structure based upon a bedrock authoritarian stability, and capable of being operated remotely if the need should arise.
Clerical celibacy has turned out to be part of the recipe for longevity of the Catholic Church.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Clerical celibacy has turned out to be part of the recipe for longevity of the Catholic Church.
No doubt Catholics were aware of the notion of spirit enslaved to flesh as Michelangelo depicted in the Academia Slaves for the tomb of Pope Julius. That idea that the spirit was captured through reproduction led Gnostics like those in Egypt and even the Shakers in America to disavow sex and reproduction period lest the enslavement of another spirit.
If that idea doesn't thumb its nose at evolution I don't know what does.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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I'd successfully ignored this thread until today, but a jstan reference motivated me to look.
Good stuff, from many of the most interesting posters on ST, and a wonderful antidote to some of the more juvenile posts and threads I've read elsewhere (and not just on ST).
Paul, it's great to read your posts here. I still hope to get to your neck of the woods with enough time to visit before too long. It must be close to 40 years since I last saw you in person.
John
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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If that idea doesn't thumb its nose at evolution I don't know what does.
It would be very hard to come up with a weaker rebuttal to evolutionary theory than the spiritual doctrine of a few outlying Shaker groups or the gnostic mysticism of beleaguered Essene cults 2000 years ago.
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