I agree. I like your point that evolution works in a nexus.
To Sauwelios: please don’t let your head explode just because others have ideas and pov’s that differ from the ones you parrot from your favorite cracked, neonazi, or rightwing authors.
What I mean is that, though the “blueprints” must be written on “paper”, it does not matter which particular “piece of paper”.
Evolution is the evolution of populations. This implies that a population is regarded as a unified whole that persists through time. However, what we’re really doing is not looking at the “evolution” of a “population”, but looking at which genes (“blueprints”) are carried by the “population” at any particular time and then comparing different times in the life of that “population” (really as many populations as there are such different times). Then we see that some genes survive past a certain point whereas others die out at that point.
There are “ends” and “value”, though no ends or value. Note the quotation marks. The “selfishness” of genes is a metaphor, as I’ve been trying to make clear from the start.
This is the sense of “personification” that we’re talking about here.
Now a meta-phor is a carrying-over of certain qualities from one concept onto some other concept. A personification, then, is a meta-phor of personal qualities from the concept “person” to another concept—for instance, the concept “gene”…
Ok so being able to learn from mistakes and be smarter and hence able to think forward about things confers no survival advantages. That’s a pretty moronic idea.
[/quote]
It may or may not confer survival advantages; it may even confer survival disadvantages. As long as its reproductive advantages are greater than the reproductive disadvantages springing from such survival disadvantages, however, it’s still evolutionarily advantageous.
I repeat: check out The Mating Mind (if this seriously interests you).
[/quote]
[/QUOTE]
It is for gods sake this is just you trying to exhort something is true despite how ridiculous it is. You’re not doing a very good job of selling this book no offence.
These suggest many diverse reasons why human intelligence was sexually and environmentally selected. Its obvious that improvements in technology may well support the development of larger brains it isn’t a closed off system evolution is an iterative feed back loop.
Magsj when did you start moderating the psychology forum…? I remember (Carleas?) or whoever used to do it not getting quite so bent out of shape over disagreements… one reason I preferred the psych to the phil forum…
Anyways, it is obvious that every human trait is selected, over time, either for or against. That is what selection means, no trait or aspect of the organisms exists independently or in a vacuum. Over time, everything is honed and fine-tuned to where it “needs” to be, that is to say, in such a way that it is the product of that long period of survivability dictated by the relationship between the organisms in question (the individuals personifying “the species”) and its environment. Intelligence, brain size or whatever is certainly no exception.
I, for one, find intelligence to be the most sexually attractive traits there is in the opposite sex… that has to say something about human sexual selection (or maybe only about me?)
(and Sauw, it is still wrong to reify the species over the individual… the species is just an abstraction and does not exist absent the individual generation… the species is not “alive” any more than a DNA nucleotide sequence chain ATAGGACCA, or whatever, is alive. That we classify individuals into species groups does not bear upon what is actually going on in nature, in the diveristy of the biosphere of living organisms… selection takes place on the individual level, and genes propogate over time (their forms), but this does not mean that these forms are “primary” or more important than the individual; it just means that the individual is a product, in part, of the individual who preceded him. I think this focus on species over individual comes from reading too much Dawkins, but thats just me…)
…since November 2009 TTG - I am (once again) responding to a report raised by a poster in regard to a reply to their post, where they felt that they were being personally attacked and not their views on the topic, which is an understandable gripe to have, no?
It depends on whether or not, in attacking another one’s views, that one is themselves also necessarily “attacked”. Do you really think these can always be separated out from each other, a person’s views and the person themselves? Such separation may be maintained only at the surface level, which is where, when we are bound by “not hurting other people’s feelings” or not “personally attacking them” (always in the eye of the beholder), the conversation always remains…
…not replying to the points that a poster has made, but instead conjuring up a reply based on a poster’s known beliefs is a valid reason for them to report a post.