From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2013 6:18 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Our Demon-Haunted World
On 7 November 2013 14:39, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
There's a continuum of behavior which at the extreme absence of empathy we
call psychopathy or sociopathy. But that doesn't mean more empathy is
better. Sometimes it's good to be hard hearted. Should we have been nicer
to the Neanderthals?
>>We'll never know. But we do know we evolved to cope with a world that is
very far removed from the one we have. Is there any reason to believe
evolution got everything right? We've already made changes to other aspects
of our being, both physically and psychologically. But certain aspects of
our behaviour still seem to be stuck in a distant past when life was almost
always nasty, brutish and short.
Evolution sometimes saddles life forms with burdensome defects - for example
almost all animals can synthesize their own vitamin C; we lost this; Human's
also have ridiculously thin walled arteries - compared to most other animal
species. In fact strokes are very rare in most species because their
circulatory systems are superior in this regard to ours. Evolution is a
mixed bag and we got what we got - both good and bad; the evolutionary
benefits of an opposable thumb, enlarged forebrain, linguistic abilities
etc. far outweighed the defects our evolutionary roulette wheel spit out and
we have succeeded in covering this planet with members of our species.
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