From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Sun Jun 04 2006 - 14:31:32 MDT
At 05:42 PM 6/4/2006 +0200, Ricardo 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...
Don't forget that the mechanisms can be examined using such tools as fMRI
and that many of the explanations lead to predictions that have been
observed in the few remaining hunter gatherers groups.
>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?
Can you name a few of these "many people?" I hope you are not referring to
me because there are characteristics I have discussed that logically *could
not* have evolved in a hunter gatherer environment. They are emergent from
characteristics that did evolve though they are usually called "side effects."
Our psychological characteristic of being vulnerable to addictive drugs is
the strongest example.
Keith Henson
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