On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote: > > We know that humans are capable of choosing self-destruction. It is > also obvious that most don't
I would argue that given the proper circumstances anybody would choose self destruction. I just saw a documentary about 911, it showed people jumping to their death out of windows. I believe if I was faced with a choice between living for an additional minute or two in searing pain as I burned to death and the only other alternative I too would determine that jumping from the 95th floor was the more attractive option. > > > and as a human you probably feel a > > strong resistance against harming yourself. Where does this resistance > > come from? Our brains where evolved to have it. But why evolve brains at all? Why not hard wire us on how to behave in every conceivable circumstance? Because the human genome is only 3 billion base pares long, and if it were a hundred thousand million billion trillion times as big it would still be ridiculously too small for that. So Evolution had to invent brains and give it a rather vague and general command "do the best you can to figure out a way to get your genes into the next generation". But like a good lawyer that brain was able to find lots and lots of loopholes in that poorly written command, and hence we have suicide and birth control pills and people wasting time (from Evolution's point of view) looking for a quantum theory of gravity instead of looking for a satisfactory mate. Not every, or even not most, aspects of human behavior can be predicted from evolutionary theory. > > > Mutations that go > > against this feature are weeded out. > A mutation to kill yourself before that age of puberty even under normal environmental conditions would be weeded out, but things are usually far more subtle than that. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
