--- The Fool <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I tend to doubt very many Brin-Lers--other than > certain Trolls--had > difficulty understanding you.
I did, actually, and I have an extensive background in evolutionary psych. My problem with it - from what I did understand - is the problem shared with most evolutionary psychology. It struck me as a "just so" story. If you wanted to come up with the exact opposite explanation, you could come up with an equally plausible evolutionary background to explain it. What you need is some empirical validation of the ideas. For example - does terrorism actually happen because of economic pressures? Well, there's some pretty good evidence (first explored 30 years ago by Sam Huntington in his "J-Curve" theory of terrorism during modernization) that terrorist movements most often occur after prolonged periods of economic _growth_, not scarcity, usually when that prolonged growth has slowed down. Very poor societies rarely produce terorrist movements, and the poor people in any society are almost never terrorists. Terrorists are, almost universally, the educated upper-middle class. So Sam argued that terrorism is actually a product of a difference between expectations and achievment of economic development, not scarcity. So how does that square with the idease expressed here? I'm not even sure, but evolutionary psychology is a very, very, very thin reed on which to rest an argument. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
