Newfie wrote:Ibon, without belaboring the point, I recognize that in human history your type of "solution" was much more widely employed.
Democracy and freedom become compromised with overpopulation. And compassion and altruism contracts down to your own tribe as brutality increases toward those groups you are competing with, whether for food or ideology.
How's Wilson doing? By now I need to reread both that and Diamonds latest.
E.O. Wilson's, The Social Conquest of Earth. I finished the book. Highly recommended. This would be the 2nd book I would suggest for folks who want to better understand the biological origins of human social evolution.
The other book is Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are from Franz de Waal.
Both of these books would merit a thread of their own. My only hesitation for starting this is that the majority of posters here at po.com lack the real intellectual curiosity to go in depth, mostly following sadly the status quo of dumbing down most topics to binary positions of blame and tired polarized positions. So many wonderful topics that are raised here that could go along way down a pathway of inquiry and collaboration of ideas are so often sadly derailed over petty stupidity. I find myself withdrawing when that happens.
Are we not just a microcosm of the dumbed down masses anyway? What more can one expect.
Yeah, I am a bit of elitist in some ways at the same time that I admit I have so much to learn and I miss the intellectual rigor that is sometimes sorely lacking here. On the other hand this site is so much better than most and you have to wade through the crap sometimes to find the pearls.
Newfie, check out the review on Amazon.com of Wilson's book. Here is the link.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R37D84WG3P ... tore=booksThis guy Paul J Watson from the Department of Biology of the
University of New Mexico really takes issue with Wilson and his position is interesting. There is a thread of comments there to his critique of Wilson's book that are worth reading. That by the way is the kind of in depth analysis that would nice to see more here at po.com.
I think Wilson group selection theory for altruism has ruffled quite a few feathers of the established theory of kin selection *inclusive fitness theory" that this guy Watson is defending. You can imagine he has his doctorate on this topic and his comments are typical of these academic turf wars. The difference however with scientific debate is that ones arguments still have to be based on science so these "political" turf wars stay within the intellectual boundaries of peer reviewed science.
When you think that 98% of our species history evolved with tribal groups competing with each other you cant help but suspect that natural selection for altruism was working on the group level as much as per kinship theory that says that altruism evolved on the individual level directly proportional to the percentage of genes shared among family members etc.
For me the dynamics that happen when tribes are out there in their environments foraging and hunting and competing with other groups offers much more selection pressure toward cooperation and altruism than related individuals within a tribe.
The real issue worth debating though is to what degree humans, unique among mammals with a eusocial arrangement, have proven to be such a dominating force on the planet. And is this social arrangement a rarity that contains vulnerabilities likely to lead to our extinction or attributes that could increase our resiliency.
Wilson mentions that humans can do better at understanding their world than what religions offer, which he says is an irrational byproduct of this group selection that all cultures exhibit. This is where I might somewhat disagree. Religions may be irrational but they show the group plasticity that is possible and this is the very thing that gives me hope in a way. It wont be the nerdy scientists that in the end will reign in our maladaptive social behaviors that have led to over consumption and destruction of the commons. It will more likely come from taboos originating in religious type spiritual movements due to consequences that will eventually lead us toward self regulation.
Sustainability grounded in unscientific spirituality or religion that achieves the goal of maintaining our species within carrying capacity would be in my opinion a very good thing. There can always be a subset of our culture that stays grounded in atheistic science while large segments require a spiritual framework with taboos to feel that tribal group sense of cohesion. They do not have to fight against each other as we see in the secular / religious divide today which really is another one of those false binaries since science and religion function on separate levels and can be synergistic to one another just as they are antagonistic today.
Many folks would embrace a more "relevant" religious spirituality that after severe consequences grounded itself in sustainability especially if this religiosity functioned as Wilson says as a kind of tribal cohesion. Rallying against other groups with less altruism and cohesion. You may dislike religions but nobody argues that they are excellent at forming tight tribal cohesion and strengthening taboos through commandments etc. This will come in very handy if a future militant Adam Smith type eco Mormon religion hits the streets and grounds its mythology on environmental sustainability. Any skeptics should just read the bible or the origins of Mormonism to see to what degree irrational absurdity can be embraced by humans. Just imagine if natural consequences of overshoot started to work on that irrational side of humans and molding taboos within a religious framework. Pork was forbidden because it actually did carry disease in bibilical times. Excessive consumption becomes forbidden because it did actually cause systemic failures during the industrial revolution. What will move the masses, news of 500ppm of carbon or the wrath of god flooding your town. If the wrath of god mirrors external consequences then there is at least the possibility that taboos will be formed toward self regulation.
Up thread a ways I posed a question nobody wanted to entertain. I will repeat it here a little bit modified which is really an attempt to touch on those taboos and what would have to happen for sustainable taboos to re-emerge, since some native cultures did historically have them.
Ibon wrote: we should really stay focused on the taboos themselves and if these taboos that were historically present in past sustainable cultures are compatible in anyway with the current dominate taker culture of treating our ecosystems and natural resources as commodities.
And if not what is the deficit in our current culture and what is needed to change this?
Who cares to offer a rebuttal on the cynic of my previous post.
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
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