Keith, you do seem to have a thing about how
hunters and gatherers engineered our genes to make us competitive. In
working with aboriginal people in northern Canada, many of whom still hunt and
gather, I've found them to be among the most cooperative and caring people I've
ever met. The groups I know something about were traditionally
matriachial, and feminine values tended to dominate social behaviour. As
one woman put it, men were considered boys until they were forty and they had to
be kept in line!
Hunting and gathering societies developed a
variety of responses to their environmental circumstances, depending on what
these were. However, I'd suggest that, in general, small group
survival would depend more on cooperative relationships than competitive
ones.
Ed
>
> At 07:49 28/09/2003 -0400, you wrote:
> >Keith speaks about the buzzards' 1% surplus of energy
> >input vs energy output. But if buzzards survive on such
> >a narow margin, don't they do it in an environment
> >that reached equilibrium long ago? Isn't our
> >environment nowhere near equilibrium?
>
> Gosh! The penny is dropping at long last! It is precisely because our
> genetic natures -- forged by an environment of hunter gathering for
> millions of years -- are very dangerous indeed in modern times, mainly
> because, in the last 200 years, we have accessed a new source of energy
> which has totally changed almost every aspects of our lives. This sudden
> accession of entirely new circumstances is something that has happened to
> no other species. But instead of ignoring or disparaging our original
> genetic natures as you seem to want to do, what we should be doing is to
> devise appropriate socio-political structures that are less dangerous than
> the ones we now have.
>
> Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>,
> <www.handlo.com>, <www.property-portraits.co.uk>
>
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