From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2013 7:08 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Our Demon-Haunted World
On 7 November 2013 15:57, Chris de Morsella <cdemorse...@yahoo.com> wrote:
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.
>>Yes. But I wouldn't necessarily call that success, not if it leads to us
dying off in large numbers because (from our perspective, at least) we
screwed up the environment. Are you saying we've done well so we should be
grateful - or something - at least it sounds like that's what you're saying,
maybe not what you intended?
I don't know that we have done well or poorly. that is injecting value
judgment; by what yardstick? Instead of homo sapiens - as we have self-named
ourselves - we should be called homo rapiens, for we have slash and burned
our way across this planet and have burned most of the fossil fuel mother
lode up in less than one hundred years. We are a locust species; were we go
desert follows. We first wipe out the great forests then destroy the top
soil, denuding the land like no locust plague has ever done. And now we
poison it with Fukushima melt downs corium hells that will keep poisoning
the world for tens of thousands of years; with all the stable
organochlorines unleashed into the biosphere since WWII - all the nerve
agents (insecticides); the PCBs, dioxins, and the whole witches brew of
mutagenic chlorinated hydrocarbons; the solvents; the tens of thousands of
chemicals many of them stable long lasting bio accumulative compounds; the
heavy metals
My opinion of our species - based on the yardstick of how we have treated
our life mother - is lower than low.
However some of us have reached brilliance and our species cultural
knowledge has grown vast - far vaster than any single person now - who knows
how things will ultimately end up - though I think unfortunately that we
behave very much in a similar manner to yeast in a vat - what happens when
the worlds sugar runs out?
We do live in interesting times. Both a blessing and a curse really; a
blessing to be a witness to such a momentous moment in the planets history -
and certainly in the history of our species; and a curse to be stuck in this
time and place as the shit begins to hit the fan.
Anyway, having cheated evolution in all sorts of ways, from domesticating
animals to cochleal implants, I for one am not prepared to sit back and say,
darn, I can't synthesise my own vitamin C so I guess I'll just have to die.
Instead I eat fruit, having benefitted from someone having worked out how to
obtain vitamin C. And if they find a way to fix strokes I'll be lining up
for that too. I don't see why we have to stick with the "mixed bag" we got
from evolutionary roulette, and I certainly haven't, having given birth with
the aid of modern medical knowledge rather than going off to a cave to do it
the natural way, thank you very much, and when my gall bladder started
playing up I had keyhole surgery rather than opting to live in pain, or die.
And as far as I'm concerned we should fix up all the other evolutionary
mistakes as soon as possible, including the ones that make some people
behave like monsters.
I agree - with the caveat that what happens when the "fixers" themselves
become monsters? Back to the nature of power and how it affects people; how
it changes people.
--
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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
--
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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
