Quoting Krimel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> [Platt]
> You don't see evolution as history? We're talking hard-wired here due to
> evolutionary processes.
>
> [Krimel]
> Ok maybe I did not go slow enough but do try to keep up. Historic times are
> those after the invention of writing. The enormous period before that
> momentous even some 12,000 year ago, is call prehistory. As in prehistoric
> cavemen and prehistoric monsters.
Let's slow down further so you can keep up. From Merriam-Webster: history
b : a treatise presenting systematically related natural phenomena
Historic times includes what happened in the past going all the way back
to the supposed Big Bang. Presumably evolution began then and whatever
hard-wiring was eventually to show itself had its beginnings from that
moment.
> [Platt]
> Yes, but the whole discussion began because a couple of scientists claimed
> we are hardwired to be benevolent. Are you suggesting that cavemen where
> Christ-like but since human history began we've become little Eichmans?
>
> [Krimel]
> In "The Science of Good and Evil" Shermer talks about the evolution of both
> kinds of morality, (note good and evil in the title). He does not say that
> prehistoric people were good; only that they lived in groups that
> approximate the number of people our brains are large enough to know
> personally. Knowing these details about people in our communities allows for
> kinds of social control over behavior that are not as effective when dealing
> with people we do not know.
Well, if you limit hard-wired morality to people we know personally, we don't
need some scientific study to tell us we generally care about people we know
more
than the great unwashed mass of complete strangers. What's a lot more
interesting
and intellectually challenging is Pirsig's claim that the world is a moral
order.
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