“Outcome”. 
How about “the process of something that is not necessarily human determining (or causing) how many times any given organism will reproduce during its lifetime”?
That something is called “nature”. The process of determination (or causation) is called “selection”. Hence, natural selection.
Isn’t it easier to just use a different word than to try to educate everyone on the nuance intentions (that they always get wrong)?
I think people will willfully and ignorantly persist in getting it wrong.
I think science has given up pandering to fools.
But generally I agree, but sadly I am not in control of the lexicon of evolutionary theory.
Just read some.
He’s been off topic for quite a while. He’s recently been obsession about “human nature” and tabula rasa, so I had to trawl back quite far for him to show himself ignoring the massive cultural, historical and personal variation in sexuality to make this “just so” pronouncements @ 2: 20FF in this video.
youtube.com/watch?v=hjJAwbc5IaE
Steve Jones is more restrained and reasonable. In fact all the other speakers are far more rational on the subject.
And of course Jonathan Miller is a fucking genius.
What Pinker does on this issue and on every issue is to simply ignore the complexity of human nature and just focus on survival nd reproductive success which is NOT the main concern of people in ordinary life.
If things don’t seem to work for a trait he plays his “mismatch” card. Always he allows his theory to drive his statements, and never allows for the variety and the possibility that most traits are selectively neutral.
But even Jonathan Miller falls into the trap is “selected for”, rather than selected by, when he talks about schitzophrenics being misplaced because their brains were selected “for” small groups.
Most of the problem is with our langauge as we have been discussing. Maybe Pinker is a bit Aspergers?? Many of the successful academics I have known were.
Thanks for the video, sculptor! I started watching it in dribs and drabs when I have a moment. I’ll comment when I’m finished.
Don’t bother. I can’t hold my breath that long, and you answer is most likely to be a pile of shit, since you cannot even articulate your own belief in god.
Wow I didn’t know you were holding your breath. The mind and human behavior are products of evolution. So it’s a matter of how evolution produced the mind and human behavior and how to proceed researching the matter. The people who conversed with Steven Pinker in the discussion you posted we’re not nearly as dismissive of his propositions as you are. Nor were they hostile.
The generalism is known.
The rest is idle speculation. Genetic evidence is unreliable from more than a few thousand years. And humans’ behaviour is far less determined by evolution than any known species. That is what makes us a unique species.
Miller, Jones, Small and Pinker agreed human behavior is not entirely explicable in terms of evolutionary psychology. How much of it is is a question for research to delimit.
Take the issue of sexual selection. How did our ancestors solve the problem of selecting mates with good genes and avoiding those with bad genes?
Sensitivity to small differences in physical appearance is one such measure. Physical appearances provide important clues to the quality of one’s genes.
The more symmetrical your body is the better on average your genes are. Less robust genes are more likely to get knocked off course by environmental setbacks such as physical injuries and parasites.
If the left and right sides of the body are very similar it’s a sign that the genes that led to that development are quite robust. Anyone who was sensitive to small differences in body symmetry and who preferred to mate with more symmetrical people would tend to have children with better genes.
So we would expect natural selection to have designed a mate selection module that was geared to detect and prefer more symmetrical mates. Research has confirmed that that is the case.
Researchers measured various features from footbreath and handbreads to ear length and ear breath and the combined these measures to produce an overall index of bodily symmetry for each person studied. When they asked volunteers to evaluate the same people for attractiveness and compared the results they found that there was a close correlation between attractiveness rating and the degree of symmetry. More symmetrical people were seen as more attractive.
Here one of the researchers in this project, evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill discusses this and other findings youtu.be/6DqJ1Wv6EtQ
So, many people today think that standards of beauty are entirely culturally determined. But the evidence has increasingly shown many aesthetic preferences are both universal and innate. Thornhill et al have shown that preferences for more symmetrical people, for example, are cross-cultural.
Natural selection programed human beings to approach pleasure and avoid pain. It’s an instinct that dates back millions of years, to a time when people needed to actively seek food, clothing and shelter every day, or risk death.
But in today’s world, such basic needs are often readily available — which changes the equation. Living in this modern age is very challenging. We now have to cope with live in a world in which everything is easily provided? And if we consume too much of it — which our reflexes compel us to do — we’re going to be even more unhappy. Now that’s what I call a First World problem.
The interconnection of pleasure and pain in the brain and helps explain addictive behaviors. This includes addictions to drugs and alcohol, food, sex and smart phones. Addictions can become the cause of pain — not the relief from it because the behavior triggers an initial response of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which floods the brain with pleasure. But once the dopamine wears off, a person is left feeling worse than before.
No.
Natural Selection resulted in such things, true but…
Evolution is an effect not a cause.
You misconception is not rare and is engendered by the mountians of ink spilt on the idle speculations of the like of Steve Pinker and Dawkins who carelessly describe the events of evolution in this fake way so has to futher their careers and make themselves seem relevant.
See correction above.
FALSE
It is a common enough failing in human cognition to attribute events to forces of nature which do not exist.
People talk about evil and good for example as if they are active agents.
The ancient world talked of spirits of disease, drought, earthquake ad infinitem.
They even now talk of cold penetrating to bones in the winter. This was a very common misconception even in science until very recently historically, until the notion of heat made that ridiculous. (Cold is not a force of nature it is the loss of heat.)
Talking as if evolution do this that or the other is also such a misconception; one that really ought not to be found in books claiming to be science.
Argument devoid of proof. False-how? In what way? Because of what?
IMHO, Sculptor is outraged by any hint of teleology in evolution. He prefers the idea of random, fortuitous development. I’m not saying he is wrong, but that opinion appears to me to be too limited. Perhaps he can tell me why it is not.
First tell me how a living organism can recognise a need for a trait in the environment and instruct its genome to build the exactly required trait to over come any obstact to the next generation!
It is so obvious that “evolution” is not predictive.
Perhaps you could tell how it could be predictive?
Organisms that feel pleasure from harm do not survive.
Organism that feel pain from eating and having sex do not survive.
Evolution is an effect not a cause.
Natural Selection is not a force of nature, its what happens when bad stuff does not make it to the next generation, whilst neutral and positive traits remain.
If harm is done to things which do not feel pain they are not likley to live long enough to have viable progeny.
Organisms that feel pleasure having sex, and eating are more likley to pass their genes and traits to the next generation.
Organisms that feel pleasure from harm do not survive.
Organism that feel pain from eating and having sex do not survive