From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Sun Jun 04 2006 - 10:28:46 MDT
Ricardo,
On 6/4/06, Ricardo Barreira <rbarreira@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Like all human psychological traits, they have an evolved origin. Even the
> > triggers for genocide can be understood by looking to the recurrent
> > conditions that periodically occurred in our hunter gatherer past.
>
> I don't doubt that people can find evolutionary explanations for
> everything even if they need to scrape deep in the bowl of
> imagination... But my personal philosophy is always that some of our
> characteristics and behaviors are simply emergent from other (possibly
> evolved) ones. Why do so many people seem to skip this possibility
> everytime they are speaking about human psychology?
This is a a good point.
In evolutionary biology more generally, if you look at books like
Augros and Stanciu's "The New Biology" (not such a new book anymore)
or A. Lima de Faria's "Evolution Without Selection" (he overstates his
case, but still has some good points), not to mention some of Stephen
Jay Gould's writings, you will find plenty of strong arguments for the
role of self-organization and emergence in evolution.
This list happens to be frequented by a number of folks who accept a
narrower, selection-focused brand of evolutionary theory [and dislike
"complex systems" ideas], but you shouldn't assume this is
representative of any group besides this list ;-)
But I agree that not enough work has been done in exploring the
interactions between self-organization/emergence and selection in an
evolutionary psychology context...
-- Ben
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