Hires

You and others in this forum are conducting a dialog that I have noticed because of its ever-increasing length. I have not made any posts because I didn’t feel that I had any thing to add. (My interests tend to be the hard sciences, a bit of engineering, and what little of the underlying mathematics that I can understand.) However, something in your 21 October post caught my eye and I would like to make a comment.

‘Why should you care what is good for ‘your children’ except when it happens to pay you personally?’ Of course, because you feel that you ought to care for them. Which is why I originally came up with the answer ‘Because we ought to be unselfish’.

Regarding the first two sentences, we do so because it is a genetic imperative.

The source for this assertion is something that I read in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. I read a lot and forget a lot, but I think I have the gist of what Dawkins was saying about his core topic.

He maintains that, it is the gene (more probably gene cluster) that is undergoing the selection process--not the carrier (cat, human, worm, etc.).  Given that, it is the behavior of the carrier of the gene that mediates how well the gene fairs in the selection process. Getting from the inner self to the outer self is, to me, black box, which I will call the mechanism. Dawkins provides a number of examples of behavior to illustrate how this mechanism could to operate in various species.

He also talked about a metric called genetic closeness. I have forgotten the exact calculation but it involves counting generations from individual A to the common ancestor and then to individual B. By this measure sibs are as close to each other as they are to their parents. (Having step parents dilutes the closeness of sibs.) Sibs are closer to each other than they are to their cousins. With a genetic closeness of 1 part in 128, third cousins are about the border of what could be called family. Beyond that, distant cousins are, geneticall, just member of the general population.

To get to the bottom line, individuals who are genetically close cooperate to enhance the survival of their shared genetic material. In humans, less close relatives also pitch in but with less intensity. I don’t offer this as a proof of the theory, but just reflect on what you have seen in your family and see if you find the mechanism plausible.

Bottom line. You care for your children because it benefits that crafty little gene inside.

Now to the last sentence in the quote. Your statement that we ought to be unselfish, I think, deal with how we interact with others in our society--by being unselfish or not.

Again, I go back to Dawkins. In his book he discusses memes, which act like genes--in the sense that they encode (characterize?) behavioral traits. To clarify what I think I mean, here is a quote from a web page titled The Structure of Memes.

Indeed, Darwinian models of genetic evolution have certainly proven their usefulness, even though it is in practice impossible to specify the exact DNA codons that determine the gene for, say, blue eyes or altruism towards siblings. As Dawkins (1976) notes, it is not necessary to be explicit about what are the constitutive elements of a gene, postulated to explain a particular characteristic or type of behavior. It is sufficient that we can distinguish the phenotypical effects of that gene from the effects of its rival genes (alleles). If we can determine the fitness resulting from these effects, taking into account the environment and the context of different, non-rival genes present in the genome, then we can make predictions about evolution.

The same applies to memes. If, for example, we observe that one meme (say Catholicism) induces its carriers to have more children than its competitors (say Calvinism and Anglicanism), and that the children tend to take over their memes from their parents, then, all other things being equal, we can predict that after sufficient time that meme will dominate in the population. Of course, in practice it is never the case that all other things are equal, but that is the predicament of all scientific modeling: we must always simplify, and ignore potentially important influences. The question is to do that as wisely as possible, and to maximally include relevant variables without making the model too complex.

How might memes operate? This is a tough question for me to answer. The best I can do is to indicate what Dawkins talked about in his book. He discussed game theory, the prisoner’s dilema, strategies to defeat the prisoner’s dilemma, some results from modeling, and what he termed Environmentally Stable Strategies (ESS).

Bottom line here is that a trait, shared among groups of individuals, could influence how well that group fares within their environment. (Could become would, if the theory proves out.)

nowiser,

I believe that you seem to have missed the example of dying for your children.  Please re-read that section of my last post and tell me what you think.

And although you said that you were ‘out’ earlier.  But something tells me you be back ‘in’ this time.

Vern R,

Thanks for your post.  I will definately look into Dawkins.

No, I didn’t “miss” that example, I just thought it was pretty obvious in association with all the other examples.

Sustaining harm to oneself in order to protect one’s personal sense of self is not necessarily “selfless.” Of course there is a “gain” to me if I save my children, but die in the process.  I benefit, because my children live.  My own death is inevitable-- I cannot escape it.  A little more time might be NICE, but it is not the most important thing in my life.  See my remarks about how there are offenses to one’s sense of self, or psyche, that are “worse” than death, or would make life unbearable.  If I could live with the knowledge that I let my children die, rather than sacrificing myself, I might very well do so.  My rational self would certainly do so.

The other possibility of course is that while my “rational” self might say, “burn all the kids you want, I’ll make more,” people often operate on the basis of emotion or instinct.  This is not speculation, this is fact.  You could, of course, point to that and say “See! It’s irrational, it must be caused by the “Force.  The Natural Law is moving you to do ‘good’ despite your inherent human selfishness”

However, your “Natural Law” is not the sole possible explanation for the phenomena that you describe.  Even if an act does not benefit me AT ALL on a personal level, it is still quite possible that I might engage in it because of the social conditioning that I have been subjected to.  People embrace self destructive religious tenets all the time.  Or I might engage in a self destructive behavior because of genetically determined levels of empathy that serve not ME as an individual, but the species as a whole.

But this is already CLEAR, and you could have easily arrived at these conclusions from my previous posts, if you had bothered to seriously subject your own assertions to the framework that I had laid out. 

I will not continue to refute every little example that you provide.  It’s pointless.  If you can’t see that your invisible “Natural Law” is only one POSSIBLE explanation for the described phenomena (and an explanation on the level of the Leprechaun, since it is untestable and unfalsifiable) then that is a personal issue that you have with the very principles upon which logical and scientific discourse are based.

As for additional evidence that there might be genetic/biological/evolutionary forces that combine to create love, empathy, goodness, etc. 

DO A FREAKIN GOOGLE SEARCH!

http://www.altruisticlove.org/docs/hurlbut.html

(Don’t get me wrong, I’m not promoting the program of these guys, they sound like freakin Nazis to me.  But the question for them isn’t WHETHER there’s a biological basis for these characteristics, it’s whether or not we should start trying to “guide” this biology for the “betterment” of mankind through various medical technologies.)

The point is, given the possibility of biological explanations for behavior, or an invisible, untouchable, unmeasurable “force,” I’ll go with the biological. 

Not the Leprechaun, the wind.

P.S.  Before you suggest that I “missed” something and that I need to “re-read” your stunningly brilliant arguments, do me the courtesy of at least entertaining the possibilities I have laid out.  SHOW me the LEPRECHAUN!

Actually, to bring this entertaining thread full circle, fundamentalist belief does have a lot to do with the Matrix.

First, the viewpoint from the outside: to believe in the movie at all requires a suspension of disbelief (a leap of faith). The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is violated here:  raising animals consumes energy, it doesn’t give you energy.  The machines would have had to feed the humans more than they would get back.  Fundamentalists are fond of brandishing this law as a proof of the impossibility of the evolution of order from disorder, whereas all that it shows is that for order to develop, it must extract energy from the environment.

Second, now from inside the film:  living in the Matrix is like being a fundamentalist: thinking that what you perceive and believe in is the real world, and not wanting to hear or see otherwise.  Being an atheist is like being unplugged from the Matrix, although I must say the food is often better here.

Third, the world of the Matrix, and the world of belief, are defended and furthered by a complex interaction of evolved structures (the memeplex for faith, the Machine world) and the humans who believe (in God or the Matrix).

Of course, we all live in our own self-made matrices, atheists no less than believers, but (at least I like to think, not wanting to burn in hell any more than the next guy) atheists at least dimly perceive the walls of their preconceptions.  And we have more fun.

Sorry for impishly resucitating a dead thread.  The Leprechauns made me do it…