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Topic: RE: virus: the Re-Awakening...? (Read 840 times) |
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hkhenson@rogers...
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Posts: 130 Reputation: 7.70 Rate hkhenson@rogers...
back after a long time
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RE: virus: the Re-Awakening...?
« Reply #1 on: 2006-10-16 20:32:25 » |
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At 01:22 AM 10/17/2006 +0200, DrSebby wrote:
>...oh my gawd! finally...where the hell has everyone been?
Busy. And the memetics list doesn't look like it will come back.
Just sent this to another list.
I became involved with evolutionary psychology some years ago--for reasons akin to a cancer patient learning a lot about cancer.
As an eventual result I wrote a paper, "Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War"
It is in print, Mankind Quarterly, Summer 2006 and a slightly longer version is on the web.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/17/194059/296
While I make the claim that ideologies (that is memes, particularly xenophobic memes) are part of the path to war (or terror), they are not ultimately causal. That role goes to the environment, or more precisely, to a human group's perception of the environment (ecosystem/economic) future prospects.
The claim is that if the conditions are proper for war or related social disruptions such as terrorism or riots, some xenophobic ideology will emerge from an evolutionary kind of memetic competition in the population.
Of course, that goes double for a population that has been attacked (or thinks they have).
The first rule for using evolutionary psychology as a "thinking aid" is that all human behavioral traits are either the direct result of selection for that trait or a side effect of something else that was directly selected.
The second rule is that the considerable majority of selection for behavioral traits happened in the long period when our ancestors lived as hunter gatherers.
I highly recommend this paper, "The Human Motivational Complex: Evolutionary Theory And The Causes Of Hunter-Gatherer Fighting" by Azar Gat for background.
http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf
Keith Henson
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