From: Eliezer Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Aug 17 2004 - 01:02:02 MDT
Keith Henson wrote:
>
> PS. Wars are *adaptive* for hunter gatherer societies. That does not
> make necessarily make wars adaptive to later societies.
I am not sure this follows from the fact that hunter-gatherer societies
war. It could be the equivalent of a mutual defection in the Prisoner's
Dilemma; not adaptive when compared to mutual cooperation, but still a Nash
equilibrium.
I do not find convincing, as words on paper, the argument that the losing
tribe's women and children would be absorbed and that this is preferable to
mutual starvation. I want to see a mathematical model describing the
necessary conditions for this, or a study of reproductive outcomes in
hunter-gatherer tribes. There is no obvious genetic reason for a tribe to
adopt male children, and as I recall my childhood Torah studies, "God" told
the Israelites to kill off all conquered tribesfolk except virgin girls.
That's not many surviving genes.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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