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Already had naturally figured this out. In reality
from a purely biological standpoint all human traits are merely for
disseminating genes. Therefore all traits are merely deceptive one way or
another to keep us functioning as good gene propigators. Sex. It's all about
sex. Anyone who doesn't think so just ain't gettin any. Yogis are the gray
matter of the gene pool, studs, the organ, in between are the other entire array
of genetic characters.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, March 28, 2005 8:26
AM
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Deceiving
ourselves
A while back, Akasha and I kicked around
the topic
of whether people who have deceived
themselves into believing bullshit are
actually
liars, or if their belief in their position changes
the case.
Well, yesterday the Boston Globe ran
a profile of evolutionary biologist
Robert Trivers,
whose work addresses self-deception from the
point of
view of its value in propagating genes.
So I thought this post might
interest Akasha and
L B and maybe a few others.
A sidebar worded
the thesis this way:
"Whether it's convincing a predator that you're a
leaf or fooling another bird into
raising your young, deceit is an
evolutionary strategy with a long and innovative
history. But as evolution
selects for better and better cheaters, it should also select
for better
and better cheating detectors. For example, Trivers argues, humans
might
have evolved to detect the sort of nervous tics that betray a lie. But there's
a
counter-strategy: self-deception. If we don't know we're lying, then we
won't act
like we're lying, and are more likely to get away with
it."
More, from the article:
"The book on deceit and
self-deception that he's now starting grows out of a brief
but widely
cited passage from his introduction to Dawkins's ''The Selfish Gene.'' If
deceit, he wrote, ''is fundamental to animal communication, then there
must be
strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to
select for a degree of
self-deception, rendering some facts and motives
unconscious so as not to betray-
by the subtle signs of self-knowledge-the
deception being practiced.'' Thus, the
idea that the brain evolved to
produce ''ever more accurate images of the world
must be a very naive view
of mental evolution.'' We've evolved, in other words, to
delude ourselves
so as better to fool others-all in the service of the great game of
propagating our genes."
Trivers speaks: ''It's a critical topic.
How many pretenders to the throne have there
been? Marx had a theory of
self-deception, Freud thought he had the topic
knocked. So there've been a
lot of major-domos in there. None of that [expletive]
survived the test of
time, so it's a huge opportunity.''
The full article is "The
evolutionary revolutionary: In the 1970s, Robert Trivers
wrote a series of
papers that transformed evolutionary biology. Then he all but
disappeared.
Now he's back—and ready to rumble."
By Drake Bennett |
March 27, 2005
http://tinyurl.com/457kj
- Patrick
Gillam
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