Simon Paynton

Surely sex is binary but gender is a continuum or spectrum.

I have respect for Richard Dawkins but I find some of his pronouncements crass and ignorant and embarrassing.

Male bower birds decorate their nests with blue things.

Bowerbirds and Blue Things

Unseen wrote:
how does evolution explain how one species’ female responds to one sort of display while ignoring others?

I don’t know the reason, but maybe it’s not entirely evolutionary.  Maybe there’s some arbitrary circumstantial reason, that combines with evolution in the overall process.

jakelafort wrote:
the issue whether we can be socialized into a compassionate mindset.

Apparently in the Quran, it says that when stoning someone to death, we should suppress our compassion.

People are born with differing levels of other-regarding empathic concern.  Some are high in it, some selfish people are low in it.  One way to get s…[Read more]

@unseen – I’m not sure.  Here’s an article about it.

Evolution of dance and color in the birds of paradise

Unseen wrote:
what explains a bird with single two or three foot long eyebrow feathers on each side or another with the longest tail feathers of any bird, despite being only about the size of a crow?

The traditional answer is sexual selection.  If a bird has the wherewithall to produce long tail feathers, then presumably it has good genes to spare.

Unseen wrote:
Your theory doesn’t seem to have any problems—that you want to admit—

A general exception is “predator swamping”, where parents will give birth to millions of offspring in an effort to get a few live births past the predators.

Davis wrote:
You cannot reduce human behaviour and the essence of everything into one or two concepts.

The theory is that we achieve our thriving, surviving and reproducing in a number of ways: instrumentally (i.e., without involving anyone or anything else); cooperatively, fairly, kin-selected/inclusively, or patriarchally/sexually.  That’s not…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
But there is front and center the issue whether we can be socialized into a compassionate mindset. There are not a great many who can or will live like subsistence slash and burn primitives or nomadic cultures.

This is the great problem faced by large anonymous groups, and the question of how to achieve it remains an open one.

jakelafort wrote:
survival chances of the species are enhanced.

Survival chances of the individual.  The individual is the carrier of the individual genome.

why is the dynamic of our fellow mammals a paradigm for our own ethics.

We share similarities with our fellow mammals, but the big difference with humans is that we are cooperative like the…[Read more]

Davis wrote:
way to gain surpluses

From what I’ve read, the crucial difference is between “immediate return foraging” and “delayed return foraging” societies.  In immediate return foraging societies, people only accumulate what they need for present purposes, maybe a day ahead.  In delayed return, someone has the opportunity to accumulate the m…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
What would a disproof of evolutionary ethics look like?

I really don’t know.  It’s like saying, what would a disproof of evolution look like?

jakelafort wrote:
I am curious to know whether evolution is a model that is instructive in that endeavor.

I’d say that evolution has already provided the ability, and we can fairly easily be socialised into and out of a compassionate mindset.

Unseen wrote:
Cats (lions excepted) and wolverines are lone hunters with little inclination to socialize apart from mating. Does that place them on a lower evolutionary rung?

They’re better than we are at being cats and wolverines.

There are a number of documented cases of lions caring for creatures like young antelopes.

Davis wrote:
Philosophers have been aware of human nature for centuries and have based moral systems on it. It is true that the better we understand how our morality evolved, the better we can develop moral systems, but to base our systems on human nature, rather than to simply have an understanding of human nature in mind while reshaping it,…

[Read more]

Davis wrote:
Once humans started having a surplus of anything, they built unjust and unspeakably cruel systems.

This is true, we get hierarchy and organised religion when groups get large.  The needs of the individual can become subsumed into those of the group, and religion protects the status quo.

More altruistic and caring societies are…

[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
Are the mammalian ethics of our closest relatives still at play?

People feel strong when they’re in a group.  Their individual goals are aligned with that of the group.  As with an individual, a group can feel relatively stronger when it has a victim to be cruel to.

Empathic concern means distress at someone else’s distress, a…[Read more]

I don’t have one.  That would be more of a sociological and historical issue.

I can say that the in-group bias was strongly in play, against an imaginarily-harmful out-group, the Jews.  When individuals become Nazis, outside of Nazi Germany, that’s often an issue of personality disorders, specifically narcissism.  Hitler was probably a narcissist.

Davis – look, I’m studying evolutionary ethics, and you can’t stop me:

Davis wrote:
If it is your own opinion just say so. If it is that of a particular author or even two just say so.

Yes, but if you are a mathematician, say, or an engineer, do you have to name the author of every single idea you use to synthesise new ideas?  Or do you just do mathematics or engineering to come up with answers to new questions?

I…[Read more]