| Re: 2 parts |
Aug. 1st, 2007|06:55 am |
>What do you mean? That there are several Dawkins and
>Selfish Genes?
No, but there are many authors. Like, "There is no God
but Man" that you cite as a scientific conclusion,
is in fact a statement made by a magician Aleister
Crowley, and, as you might guess, not entirely his
invention.
When I mentioned Dawkins, you replied, among other things:
But the "Selfish Gene" happens to be to a large part
dedicated to origin of compassion, explaining why it
is natural and how it came to be an evolutionary winner
for social animals (not the winner, for it is quite
possible to live and reproduce being almost deprived
of compassion). Moreover, origin of compassion and its
justification in terms of evolution is the main motive
of this book: there is "pun intended" hidden in the
title. "The Selfish Gene of Altruism", it should
read.
You couldn't have missed it, you've got a good brain.
Either you had special filters inserted (that happens
to one with aversion to certain key words) or you have,
postfactum, in your distant memory, confused his work
with other essays by other authors that you have read
around the time.
>Or perhaps, could it
>be that you haven't noticed some of the political and
>social implications of his theory?
But certainly. I am sure I have missed A HUGE LOT of
the political and social implications of his theory.
This is how I know it: my sister sent me once an
interesting and finely written book by Robert Wright,
"A Moral Animal". From Dawkins' theory he sort of
derived that victorian values, at least in somewhat
softer and more liberal version, are good for the
society in terms of minimizing the sum of human
suffering. I happen to know that Dawkins, for one,
have never embraced victorian values -- but social
sciences are not precise, hence mutually exclusive
implications of any theory are numerous.
Minimizing the suffering as the aim of the evolutional
psychology is never disputed, though. But the ways to
achieve that goal occuring to various people are
beyond my imagination. I would have certainly missed
them if not directly confronted.
>If you don't agree to see the implications of
>"programming", "engineering", "language", metaphors
>with nature and machines, the problem of metaphors
>in scientific thinking and engineering, etc., what
>can I say?
Why, explain to me what is the problem, of'course.
Avoiding (whenever possible) arguments of the sort
"Einstein was a professor, and all the professions
make people lie, that is why I don't believe his
statement that light can be focused by gravity". |
|