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From: gjk@talcott.UUCP (Greg Kuperberg)
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: Re: A Question!
Message-ID: <332@talcott.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 7-Mar-85 11:52:03 EST
Article-I.D.: talcott.332
Posted: Thu Mar  7 11:52:03 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 10-Mar-85 06:01:38 EST
References: <901@decwrl.UUCP>
Organization: Harvard
Lines: 61

>>>Love is a *part* of nature!
>>>         tim sevener  whuxl!orb
> 
>Greg Kuperberg  ==  >
>>Yes, but the general rule is indifference to anything other than
>>offspring.  The general rule for humans on the other hand is cooperation,
>>while murder is usually exceptional enough to make the headlines of the local
>>papers.  And war is exceptional enough to attract the attention of the whole
>> world.
> 
>I have the following counter-arguments:
> 
>1. The general rule is indifference: socially organized animals, such as wolf
>(and other canine and feline and ape) families which include adults which may
>not be part of the mating pair(s) or decendants of such pairs.  Also, what
>about the lack of indifference between the members of a mating pair, this lack
>of indifference demonstrated variously among differenct species as grief upon
>death of a mate, grooming and touching and other bonding activities, defense
>or added aid against a predator.

I didn't say it was a strict rule.  Sure, there are socially organized
animals.  But the question is, how many mammalian species, much less
vertebrate species, are socially organized?  I guess many animals also care
for their mate as well as their offspring, so my statement was an
overstatement.  However, except for the socially organized species, and I
think there are not too many of these, one member of a species simply
doesn't care about almost all the other members of the same species.

> 2. War attracts the attention of the whole world:  only if it makes good copy,
> sells lots of papers.  Touch subjects like genocide may be too distasteful
> to keep many readers for very long.  

It's true that the public has a dissappointingly short attention span.  But
it's remarkable that the public even considers the issue at all:  Even when
a war has fall from public attention, the response as to why is usually
"Yes, it's bad, but I have other things to think about" rather than total
indifference, as in "So what if there's a war?  That's as irrelevant to me
as the weather on Mars."

> Generalizations about nature are usually losing things to make.  Extrapolating
> from a few samples doesn't guarantee that it will apply to all.  Looking for
> similar patterns, which is different from generalizing, can be useful, but
> care must be taken that too much information is not lost in the distillation. 
> 
> L S Chabot

Actually, this I agree with.  However, the argument started off with "Why
aren't humans as cruel as nature?", so it was a losing thing from the
start.

Incidentally, if anyone is curious for my non-religious reply to the original
question, it is:  Because humans evolved into being social animals, and
because they also evolved intelligence (well, sort of :-)) and saw that
cooperation is a good idea.  More specifically, humans have this thing
called civilization, which evolves in a Lamarckian way, and Lamarckian
evolution is far more effective than Darwinian evolution.
---
			Greg Kuperberg
		     harvard!talcott!gjk

"2*x^5-10*x+5=0 is not solvable by radicals." -Evariste Galois.