[MD] example of reciprocal altruism?

[MarshaV]

Hi Platt,

If you listened to that 2-part program on Neanderthals, you'd note 
that science once believed one thing and now believes something quite 
different.  It's all so much myth.  It's reality until patterns 
change.  I do not have a problem seeing all human knowledge as a 
temporary understanding.


Marsha











At 02:33 PM 12/27/2008, you wrote:
>Hi KO, Craig, Marsha, All:
>
>A couple of monkeys behaving with reciprocity in a zoo is hardly evidence
>of our inheriting a spirit of cooperation from our animal ancestors. In
>fact, our closest monkey relatives, the chimpanzees, "formed hunting
>posses" in the wild and "tore baby baboons they captured limb from limb and
>seemed to enjoy it." -- Lionel Tiger, professor of anthropology, Rutgers
>University, WSJournal, 12/27/08 .
>
>Pirsig also presented less than a heartwarming picture of our evolutionary
>inheritance:
>
>"What the Metaphysics of Quality indicates is that the twentieth-century
>intellectual faith in man's basic goodness as spontaneous and natural is
>disastrously naive. The ideal of a harmonious society in which everyone
>without coercion cooperates happily with everyone else for the mutual good
>of all is a devastating fiction.
>
>"Studies of bones left by the cavemen indicate that cannibalism, not
>cooperation, was a pre-society norm. Primitive tribes such as the American
>Indians have no record of sweetness and cooperation with other tribes. They
>ambushed them, tortured them, dashed their children's brains out on rocks.
>If man is basically good, then maybe it is man's basic goodness which
>invented social institutions to repress this land of biological savagery in
>the first place. (Lila, 24)
>
>This reminded me of the phrase "thin veneer of civilization." When I
>entered it in Google the following passage quickly came to the fore:
>
>"Civilization (which is part of the circle of his imaginings) has spread a
>veneer over the surface of the softshelled animal known as man. It is a
>very thin veneer; but so wonderfully is man constituted that he squirms on
>his bit of achievement and believes he is garbed in armor-plate.
>
>"Yet man to-day is the same man that drank from his enemy's skull in the
>dark German forests, that sacked cities, and stole his women from
>neighboring clans like any howling aborigine. The flesh-and-blood body of
>man has not changed in the last several thousand years. Nor has his mind
>changed. There is no faculty of the mind of man to-day that did not exist
>in the minds of the men of long ago
>
>"It is the same old animal man, smeared over, it is true, with a veneer,
>thin and magical, that makes him dream drunken dreams of self-exaltation
>and to sneer at the flesh and the blood of him beneath the smear. The raw
>animal crouching within him is like the earthquake monster pent in the
>crust of the earth. As he persuades himself against the latter till it
>arouses and shakes down a city, so does he persuade himself against the
>former until it shakes him out of his dreaming and he stands undisguised, a
>brute like any other brute."
>
>http://www.erblist.com/erbmania/nkima/veneer.html
>
>All of which has led me to reiterate Pirsig's stern advice to today's
>intellectuals:
>
>"Where biological values are undermining social values intellectuals must
>identify social behavior, not matter its ethnic connection, and support it
>all the way without restraint. Intellectuals must find biological behavior,
>no matter what its ethnic connection, and limit or destroy destructive
>biological patterns with complete moral ruthlessness., the way a doctor
>destroys germs, before those biological patterns destroy civilization
>itself." (Lila, 24)
>
>Our civilization is under attack. Will our "intellectual" leaders heed
>Pirsig's advice? I have my doubts. We shall see.
>
>Platt
>
>
> > Yes, you are right Craig but people behave altruistically often without
> > thought of reciprocity - they do this by virtue of inheritance. The
> > reciprocity is the quality that was selected.
> >
> > -KO
> >
> > 2008/12/27 <craigerb at comcast.net>
> >
> > > [KO]
> > >
> > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7797776.stm
> > > Good news for those of us who see mutual cooperationas
> > > evolutionary.However, the term 'reciprocal altruism' is oxymoronic
> > > inEnglish.  'Altruism' is doing something for another's sakewithout
> > expected
> > > benefit to one's self.  A betterdescription is the one from the
> > article
> > > above, viz.,"calculated reciprocity".Craig
>
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.
Credo of Albert Einstein:  Although I am a typical loner in daily 
life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of 
those who strive for truth, beauty and justice has preserved me from 
feeling isolated.
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