--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Gillam" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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.''
Well then, this hypothesis may be an explanation of the George W. Bush phenomena. Rick Carlstrom 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 To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
