writes:
> Let me give an example. Nation A using its military power to take the
land,
> rape the women, and kill the men of nation B. Since that behavior
increases
> the probability that the genes of the men of nation A who engage in this
> behavior will be passed on, does that make it the ethical thing to do?
> Would someone who argued for peace be unethical?
How do the women whose men and probably children were killed
feel? How would they feel about nurturing the children of
these men? Do they have any influence on those children?
Would some of the children, inheriting the hate of their
mothers take vengeance upon their fathers? Would a cycle
like this be healthy for a species? The more of your
species you kill, the smaller the gene pool and the greater
the tendency of your offspring to kill (I would think).
> OK, then just killing the men and raping. Or, just enslaving them all, and
> having the women bear your children instead of the children of the men
> involved...and make the men work for the upkeep of your children. That is
> evolutionarily favored, right? (Zimmy, feel free to jump in and show how
> this is evolutionarily disfavored.)
Yes it is favored and basically it is the history of our species. Modern
hunter gatherer groups behave in precisely this manner. Kill the men and kids
rape or steal the women.
It seems to me that that that would only be favored if we
were emotionless zombies and that if social behavior was of
little importance.
Social behavior is important and humans do have a capacity to behave in the
best interests of a group but the group is not all humans, it is your own
tribe. If you do the math there a small possibility for doing things that
favor a group of genetically unrelated (or not very related) individuals.
But part of the math involves the ability to form coalitions that have as
one of their purposes the destruction of other groups. Male chimps will
band together and will kill chimps from other troops. Humans will band
together to kill entire troops (or tribes).
>
> OK, enslaving people for generation upon generation may be more favored
than
> genocide. But, I know of many mass killing in history, so I don't see how
> you can argue that this is unnatural.
Do you know of any culture or of any species that has
survived through a strategy of genocide?
Depends on what you mean by genocide. Until recently mass murder was not
technologically possible. But we as a species have wiped out other tribes as
often as we could.
Indeed, in many ways, ethics are
> unnatural. The natural tendency is to look out for you and yours. The
> unnatural tendency is to love your enemy.
So I just got done reading Matt Ridley's "The Origin of Virtue". Quite good
until the very end where he (like many authors) slips over from well argued
science to politics. Ridley (the author of Genome and The Red Queen -two of
the best books around about modern state of genomes and evolution) argues
that human morality arose as an adaptation. He starts by talking about game
theory covering much of the same ground as Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" .
Lots of neat things about Prisoner's Dilemma and Tit for Tat. He moves on to
discuss how primates cooperate and about the importance of hunting. He tries
to establish the narrow circumstances in which individuals would sacrifice
for the group (only if it benefits one's own genes). He goes from there to
discussing human societies. At the end he takes an unfortunate right turn (I
worry that so many of the science writers I like best are or are accused of
being very conservative) into a defense of private or group property
ownership. Maybe more libertarian than conservative. Anyway worth the read.
>
> BTW, I'm not accusing you of believing that any of the above is good.
Understood.
>I'm just arguing that is evolutionarily favored behavior.
I don't see it. If evolution selected for killers and
rapists and the like - anti social behavior - wouldn't life
have a tendency to whittle itself down - kill itself out?
Don't we need some semblance of social behavior to thrive?
The fact that human kind has formalized and codified social
behavior doesn't mean that it didn't exist beforehand, does it?
Murder and rape are very common in nature at least killing and forced
sexual contact are (the animal equivalents of murder and rape). Species can
exist quite easily with these activities. Male dolphins form coalitions
that isolate females and have sex with them.They can form alliances to
steal females from other small groups of males. Social animals are
constrained in their behavior not by morality but by the actions of other
members of the society who act in their own self-interest. This really gets
at the interesting question. Why aren't we all rapists? After all, if
having forced sex makes for more babies then why doesn't selection favor
the rapist? One reason is that the assumption is that females are powerless
to stop rape but this isn't true.They have the society itself and their
male kin to provide the necessary power to prevent rape. If rape is part of
war they have their own men to fight off the enemy.
