Sunday School 27th March 2022

Thanks Reg!!!

The Progressive Left thinks mere words…

Blah blah blah. Meaningless stupid ridiculous overgeneralisations. Just stop Enco. Please. Seriously. WTF? I would react the same if someone said such vacuous nonsense about “the reactionary right”. Hyper overgeneralisations make us all less intelligent.

The Progressive Left thinks mere words

Just stop with the generalisations. If you are going to malign a huge chunk of people, narrow them down a little (which of the millions upon millions of diverse progressives?), throw in a bit of evidence/sources and strong examples (not just a few outrageous cases, stretching the meaning of the article sourced beyond what it actually covers and using good sources)

Personality and Individual Differences

You used a journal article in a journal that was cited THREE times last year. Are you trawling the internet for anything to support for gross overgeneralisations?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by Davis.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by Davis.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

By “we” do you mean just Homo sapiens or are you including others like Homo erectus where co-operative food sharing and breeding is first thought to have developed? Would it not be the case that we would have self domesticated into groups after we saw that our chances of survival were higher because we co-operated in first place?

The thing about cooperating is that it requires that the profits are shared equally (on some basis).  If there is a domination heirarchy, those at the top grab all the spoils, while those at the bottom get nothing, and crucially, are not motivated to cooperate again.  So cooperation falls apart.

You’re right, all the evidence points to Homo erectus, and similar species around at the time, 2 million years ago, as the first species to share food and breed cooperatively.  I think the story of the self-domestication of the human race is different from that set out in the book “The Goodness Paradox”, and is the result of three linked situations:

1) pair-bonding for the purpose of reproduction led to the existence of families.  Chimpanzees and bonobos live in dense forest populations and mating is multi-male, multi-female, with no reproductive pair-bonding, and the alpha male (chimp) trying to grab all the fertile females for himself, and not always succeeding.  When environmental conditions grow more harsh, the population is less dense and one male can then dominate a number of females, leading to polygynous pair-bonding.  At least in the primate world, males always want to do this, which is why we have patriarchy.

In the australopithicenes, the family preceding Homo, the males were a lot larger than the females, which suggests but does not prove that they were mating polygynously.  In Homo erectus, the sexes were nearly the same size.  One hypothesis states that a move from polygynous to monogamous mating happened because the males now had access to weapons (stone tools) that could level the playing field between males physically.  Even so, apparently, genetic analysis suggests that the reproductive skew between males and females was 1:3, meaning that only 1 in 3 males got to reproduce (after city states started, that became 1 in 16).

2) sharing around scavenged corpses required that humans band together to scare off animals of other species, and also, that they reject or discipline bullies and hogs who would try to grab everything for themselves.

3) also for species living in harsh conditions, such as early humans, cooperative breeding is a way for everyone to survive.  This also would have helped to pacify the human race.

Some knock-on effects of these situations would have been 1) male-female egalitarianism and 2) male-male egalitarianism.  This finally sets the stage for sophisticated cooperation where all participants can be motivated by fair shares of the proceeds.  Cooperation further strengthened egalitarianism because in a sense, people became less important than the role they played and following its demands.

As for the reactive and proactive violence mentioned in “The Goodness Paradox”, that’s an interesting point.  If it’s true, which it largely seems to be, that humans take part in proactive violence while other primates don’t, then it may be because unlike other primates, we have moral anger, the anger we feel when someone violates norms or sacred values.  Other primates just don’t have organised moral norms.

your broad assertion that there are no out Gay athletes in the entire Western World

Enco…stop with the misrepresenting what people say. You failed to read what I said clearly (as you often did). I said out athletes in top tier European football leagues or in the North American leagues: NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB. Pay attention to what people say Enco. Yes, there are out Olympians and rugby players, gymnasts and figure skaters. I was referring to top tier league players of which there are none in Europe and one in North America. I didn’t reply because your reply was bogus. Read what people write Enco.

So rather than address the claim, you poo-poo the source on the grounds that it hasn’t been cited enough.

Enco, if you want to take us seriously, use serious sources. If you want us to value your intellectual integrity, don’t ignore the majority of sources out there contradicting your view and go fishing for dubious nonsense that backs it up. I’m not wasting my precious free time engaging in your cognitive bias.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by Davis.

College is not top tier Enco. Details matter. Pay attention and try not to misrepresent what people say or repackage them to suit your world view.