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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (205370)	10/7/2006 5:55:23 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

While I don’t think that our genetic coding could have significantly changed over the last 5,000 years, I do think that our self-understanding has developed at a breakneck speed. It's just another way of saying, as all known cultures do, we are The Real People, the rest are The Others And Not Quite Human. In point of fact, if you were able to travel at will through time and space, and collected infants from every culture and time in not just the last 5,000 years, but probably the last 40,000 years or so, and brought them up together, you wouldn't be able to tell any difference between the finished results that wasn't due to ordinary human variation from human to human. Contrariwise, if you shuffled the same infants at random from culture to culture and time and place to time and place, they'd grow up just like the people around them. "Self-awareness" just means "this is the way we are, and we think we're the best that ever was." NB: I am not arguing in favor of cultural relativity, but against any human cultural achievement being anything but learned, not in the last innate.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (205370)	10/7/2006 6:18:12 PM
From: GPS Info	Respond to of 281500

Unless there's a difference in DNA, self-understanding can't develop much. I think we could be discussing this beyond what either of us requires. The last 4 thousand years could have filtered some undesirable traits out of the human genome, but I wouldn’t know what was lost. Do you feel that we’re less violent than we were 5,000 years ago? Is this because women wanted kinder and gentler mates? Jared Diamond has it back to front. I think that without the correct initial conditions outlined in Jared Diamond’s book, we might still be hunting and gathering to this day. There is a comedian, Rob Becker, who has an extended monologue on a topic that he calls “Defending the Caveman” here: cavemania.com Having listened to pieces of this, I think we are much closer to our hunter/gatherer ancestor than we would like to think. He compares how men and women shop: men like they are hunting and women like they are gathering. Men know what they want because they need to replenish supplies, for example, when meat runs low. A man is much less likely to shop for other items after he finds what he originally went looking for. In a hunting metaphor, he focuses is mind on a particular animal and once killed, returns it to the tribe to share the meat. He doesn’t linger around the kill because butchering the animal leaves a lot of blood on the ground and that will quickly attract other predators. Rarely do women hunt with men; instead, they will explore their territory to determine what vegetative resources are available. If something is not ready to be harvested, they will need to remember to return at the appropriate time (a “sale” in modern parlance). This represents the second half of our survival. This activity is not time constrained as is hunting, and so is done at a more leisurely pace. According to Becker, this is why men become frustrated while shopping with women.