Natural selection is the fittest organisms survive and reproduce, not the strongest fittest organisms help the weaker ones survive and reproduce. what you said puts the strong monkey at risk, and therefore makes that monkey weak and prevents him from passing on his genes. If a monkey is drowning, it probably has traits that make it more likely to drown, and therefore, has weak traits. If a stronger monkey were to try to save a weaker monkey, not only is the strong monkey risking loosing his strong genes, it’s also risking allowing weak genes to remain in the gene pool. In many species animals will actually go out of their way to kill weak animals, not go out of their way to save weak animals. For example, I own chickens, if one chicken gets sick or gets hurt the other chickens will peck it to death. That way, if that chicken has some trait that makes it prone to sickness or makes it easily injured the weak trait is eliminated from the gene pool.
The last part of your post is probably true, but, in the case of monkeys and humans, your personality is greatly affected by how you are raised. If your parents are rednecks, you’re probably gonna be a redneck, if your parents are Christian, you’re probably gonna be Christian, if your parents are selfish, you’re probably gonna be selfish. So even though selfishness probably isn’t actually controlled by genes, in species where the parents teach the young personality traits are passed on from generation to generation.
If you read that closely, it says that kin selection, occurs among, well, kins. If you are a fit monkey and you have a lot of relatives, your relatives are likely to be fit too, so this isn’t the strong helping the weak, but the strong helping the strong.
Edit: Also, this occurs among more colony minded organisms. A colony is a lot like one big complex organism as far as natural selection is concerned. I’m really not sure how to word this, so I hope you understand what I am saying.
If you get a bunch of similar minded people together to form an anarchist micro-society, it might work for a year… two years… three years… maybe more. But it won’t last forever. In the long run, the society will collapse, because individuals will want more. New generation will arrive and may not agree with what’s going on in said society (unless you completely cut that society off of the rest of the world, so they’ll grow up in the illusion that anarchy is the only system in existence… and even still, our history is riddled with change because some individual had a sudden rush of brainjuices and came up with new ideas…)
Capitalism worked fine so far, and while it might not be the fairest of systems (especially not when you get people taking more than they already can take), it’s by far the one closest to our primal instincts.
Don’t underestimate human ambition. Even if you’re anarchist-minded right now, i 2-3 years you might change ideas, you might get ambitions, and the moment you do, you’ll have no chance of living in a flawless anarchist society;
Then how come there’s tribes in Africa that have no system of ownership at all, and live from hunting and gathering, and have done so for thousands of years?
Garthbartin, everyone of your own species is kin. They’re all genetically related. Look at Hamilton’s rule.
And even so, if someone is closely related to you they might still be “weak,” even if you are “strong.”
No, Kin refers to close relatives, people/animals with extremely similar DNA to yours. And because they have extremely likely DNA, they are really likely to share many of your characteristics. I don’t have time to look up Hamilton’s Rule I have to go to school, I’ll do it later.
Dude, you aren’t reading. I appreciate that you don’t have time to follow up every argument, so I’ll just copy-pasta the relevant facts for your convenience:
Boltech, why do you think capitalism “works”? In what context does it work? In the context of your life? In the context of all lives? What about in the context of in 500 years? Given all the damage to the environment and the depletion of resources (We’re used up oil that took millions of years to form in the depths of the earth’s crust in a little more than a hundred years of greed, and we just keep needing more), given that billions live in grinding poverty, given that corporate owners can manipulate the political process with impunity all over the world to keep money flowing into their coffers, given that these people have profited from wars fought for vague reasons at the cost of ten of thousands of lives…how the FUCK
[/SIZE] can you say that “works”?
You are arguing about the wikipedia article, and you haven’t even read it?
Hamilton’s rule is on that page.
Forget about semantics, this principle is about anyone who’s related to you, near or far.
mattemuse’s wikipedia quote illustrates this too. If two individuals share even one gene, there is potential for the behaviour described.
FYI The Supreme Court ruled today that barring corporations from giving financial contributions to political candidates violates their (the corporation’s) right to free speech.
Oh, so your perfect world of anarchy = sit around naked/in shoddy clothes, eat once/twice a week, hardly ever wash, know no comfort at all and just be downright primitive? But hey, at least everything’s shared equally and everyone stinks as much as the other.
Capitalism works because I work and I earn money that way. With that money I can buy the things I want, I can make my life comfortable. Do I hate paying bills? Yes. Do I hate seeing top business men making 10 times more than I do for their work? Yes I do. Do I want some lowlife failure that never bothered to look for a job have the same luxury I have, without having even bothered to work? Fuck no. Let that punk rot in hell for all I care. I work for my life, I earned what I have, I did something with my life.
I’d rather give a fraction of my earned money to “the man” that bothers to run this country/company and makes sure I can have my own life, than giving my money to everyone, no matter what their input in the society is. I pay “the man’s” wage, he pays mine. If i was to pay the lazy punk’s wage, he wouldn’t be paying mine. That’s why capitalism works.
And seriously, fuck earth. You don’t care about the planet, nobody does. People are QQing about the decline of this planet out of pure self-preservation. Earth won’t die, earth won’t implode, earth will find a way to overcome the current “corruption”. It has in the past, it will do so in the future. Mankind probably won’t survive that. But hey, that’s a good thing, is it not? Without mankind, there won’t be anyone fucking up the fresh planet.
Capitalism is the best of the worst. It’s simple as that. None of the systems will make everyone happy, none of the systems are fair. None of the systems are abuseproof.
Even if you only take a select group of likeminded anarchists and start an anarchist society, how long do you honestly believe it’ll last? How long do you think it’ll last before one person starts feeling as if he’s missing out on a lot? How long will it take for one person to start thinking “pffuuu, I’m working my ass off, and what do I get in the end? The same as everyone else”. Even if you’re all “ZOMG ANARCHY RAWKS” when the society starts, human nature will surface sooner or later.
And even still, -if- human nature doesn’t surface -within- that society, it will surface outside of the society. That anarchist society will slowly but surely fall behind on the rest of civilization. It will only take one group of territorial pissheads to pass by and go “zomg easy target” (Somali pirates, for example) and take over, just because they can. Just because they’re human.
And that brings us to the original point: can an anarchy exist? No, it can not. If it isn’t destroyed over time from within, it will get overwhelmed from outside.
Now, if you go to a different planet with a group of anarchists and completely start from scratch, that’s a different thing. But then -that- brings us to the story of the monkeys earlier in this thread. It’ll work because the following generations haven’t experienced anything else apart from an anarchy… Until, of course, human nature surfaces and ideas for change spring to mind.
What the fuck are you talking about. Did you know that we have enough of almost everything? Food, clothing, materials for shelter? It’s all out their, in warehouses and sitting in lots. We have created scarcity in the name of profit. Food is thrown away by companies who make too much, clothing is sent by the tons to landfills, houses sit empty while people scramble to afford roach-infested apartments.
You also fall prey to an amusing idea about how people in the past lived. You have an image of a caveman huddled around a fire, shivering at the roaring of beasts outside, terrified. What tripe. Cavemen were master survivalists, tough and undaunted. They hunted mammoths with spears, froze their meat, made art of unsurpassed beauty. They hunted for 4 hours a day, went home, kept their spears in order, fucked, and then did whatever they wanted. Disease was sometimes a problem, but since tribes were small it rarely killed a significant number of people.
There is an island off the coast of India where people still live as they did tens of thousands of years ago. They’re hale, sturdy people, tall and strong, not some starving rabble. They hunt and fish a few hours a day, then sit and tell stories and laugh and fuck, naked and free. They survived the tsunami virtually unscathed. They’re badass.
But all that’s beside the point-technology isn’t evil. It’s abusing it that’s evil. No reason we can’t keep modern medical and electronic equipment as we move away from authoritarian institutions to voluntary ones, we just need to use them with a greater consideration on the long term impact on our planet.
Capitalism is like one of those early, preposterous flying machines people built, fancy and intricate and utterly doomed, no matter how much effort you make in trimming the cables or widening the flapping wings, because it simply doesn’t work. We’ve been riding this thing off a cliff for ten thousand years, seemingly making good progress-the wings are heaving back and forth and the wind is zooming but we’re fucking DOOMED! The machine is in free fall, the ground is rushing up to meet us, we can SEE it now, but we shake our heads and stubbornly cling to the controls, hoping that we can pull out of it, because we just can’t seem to imagine a different way of doing things.
If we want to go into the stars someday, and explore this big, beautiful universe, if we want to be bringers of order and calm rather than pervayors of obliteration and greed, we must change before it’s too late. And that’s something you don’t grasp in the depths of your pseudo-individualist egotism, Boltech, we ARE a species united by self-interest and empathy and compassion, a whole from many diverse parts, and while you may not care about that, most of US do.
How would anarchism force you to support someone who wasn’t contributing? You get to decide how to relate to others. If you thought a lazy guy was taking advantage, you could talk to the others and throw his ass out. You don’t seem to realize that it’s YOU who has the onus to affect your life, to solve its issues, to make your experience optimal. If a guy is being lazy, tell him so. Call him a disgrace to what it is to be a man. If you have a problem with the people you delegate managing things to letting people fuck around, talk to others, share opinions, act. Call a vote of no confidence. If the incompetents try to hold on to power, if they act against you, destroy them without pity or remorse.
A people who internalize a simple value-leave me alone to do my business that’s not harming you, I’ll leave you alone to do as you like, fuck with me in a violent way, try to rule me or conquer me, try to intimidate me into bowing to you, and I’ll rip your skin off with a cheese grater and rub salt in the wound-these are anarchists, and it is this concept that must make its way to the hearts of most people-an overwhelming contempt for authority, a willingness to think for yourself and listen to others-in order for us to become free. Because in a world united with the resolve to have No Masters, a world with that idea burning in people’s hearts…we will have Anarchy.
Earth is our home. It’s our children’s home. It was the home of our ancestors going back into distant eons. We are its unique and remarkable offspring, a species that communicates and reasons and has the capacity to grow, to explore, for the pure joy of it, birthed from millions of years of evolution. This planet is beautiful. From the living jewels of diatoms that glitter as they photosynthesize food to the cuttlefish shimmering with neon yellow and black and violent red as they expans and contract their color cells like living abstract paintings to the blasts of orange lava bleeding out of volcanoes as new islands are born amidst hissing steam to the savage dance of survival as tigers stalk the jungle as silent as death. I’m sorry you can’t see that you are living in the greatest, most powerful collection of awesome beauty ever seen in the universe.
I’m a human. I can experience empathy and altruistic impulses. I want those who come after me, those who are capable of deep thought and laughter, to have a place to live that’s free and beautiful. I’m not selfish or jaded or broken inside, as you seem to be, going through the motions of work-eat-sleep, allowing the mundane to blind you from your place in a vast, interconnected world.
You’re helping my argument. In that quote it repeatedly says relatives. Kin selection occurs among relatives and if you are strong, your relatives are much more likely to be strong, so, once again, this is an example of the strong helping the strong or the weak helping the weak, not the strong helping the weak.
I read the first part. Alright, lets say you are right. This still doesn’t debunk the original topic, that selfishness is encouraged by natural selection. In the case of kin selection, this isn’t selflessness. It’s simply a squirrel thinking, why if me and this other squirrel team up, I have a better chance of leaving, not, this other squirrel looks like he needs some help, I’ll warn him if any predators come.
I know it’s hard to follow this discussion because of all the wall-of-text posting. Let me recap it for you:
My argument is that altruism (helping others) can be evolutionarily beneficial.
Your rebuttal is that helping others is evolutionarily weak behavior, and won’t be passed on because it decreases individual survival rates.
Kin Theory says you are wrong, because altruistic behavior can still be passed on through the same gene being present in relatives, who’s survival rate is increased by altruistic behavior even though the altruistic individual’s survival rate might be reduced.
Garth talks of stronger genes and weaker genes. How stronger wouldn’t be obliged to help out the weaker ones. Unfortunately, it appears the weaker are procreating at a higher rate than the stronger ones. I see it in the way of “Idiocracy” even though it was a shit movie.
I would like to go back to the chimps and the electrified ladder scenario as this is supposedly evidence of “false walls”. Remember the scenario?
You have three chimps, a cluster of bananas and a ladder leading up to those bananas. You electrify the ladder. The chimps try to get the bananas, but get shocked. You introduce chimps one by one, and they are blocked from the bananas by fisticuffing chimps. Eventually, the original chimps are removed and you have fisticuffing chimps that will block the ladder without knowing why they’re blocking it.
I have one slight problem with this scenario:
IT MAKES NO GOD-DAMNED SENSE!
Human beings are smarter than that and a lot more resourceful. If the bananas are blocked these chimps, they’ll get to the bananas another way. Even if they have to kill others to get to them.
In a law-free, rule-free society, what’s to stop a nefarious chimp from killing all his buddies in their sleep and getting to the ladder that way? They’re obviously blocking his way to the ladder, so, remove the obstacle. You’ll have utter chaos.
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