Keith Henson wrote:
I think that if you want to try to understand why humans do things you have to look at how our psychological mechanisms were shaped in the EEA, the environment of evolutionary adaption.
I have to? There's no other way? ;-) No non-evolutionary explanations? Not that I am proposing to discard evolution. It just seems to me that there's more to us than can be explained by evolution, especially given our limited understanding of it.
So why now and not 50 years ago for Bin Laden? Simple.
I doubt that.
High population growth and low economic growth in the Islamic countries has switch a substantial enough number of them into this mode. When this mode was switched on 100k years ago, even up to Biblical times, one tribe would attack another, with the winner killing all of the loser tribe except for the young women who became extra wives for the winners.
Seems vastly over-simplified, but perhaps useful. My question is, how is this meaningful to the decisions I may make today?
Unfortunately morality seems to be optimized for the other side of the cycle, where the humans are small in numbers compared to the resources available. In such times it makes far more sense for war mode to stay switched off and for the humans to concentrate on hunting and raising kids for the *next* cycle.
There is more of this depressing subject, but unless someone wants more I will cut it off here.
I do appreciate Thom Hartmann's thinking along these lines with regard to my favorite disorder, ADHD.
http://www.thomhartmann.com/home-add.shtml
especially this:
http://www.thomhartmann.com/addapt.shtml
Nick
P.S.
Not long ago, I was chatting for the first time in about 10 years with the guy who was my product manager at CompuServe when I used to manage some of their forums. He was updating me on some of the other folks who we both knew from there and he mentioned Thom Hartmann. Until then, I hadn't realized that I actually used to know this guy whose books I've enjoyed so much since recognizing my own ADHD.
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