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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (14299)	3/14/2011 1:54:17 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	1 Recommendation Respond to of 69300

"lives transformed for the better" Impossible to rule out two basic elements of human psychology: the placebo and casino effects. In re the latter, there isn't much press devoted to "lives transformed for the worse", which are surely out there and may outweigh the positive examples. It's an inherent weakness of trying to elaborate individual accounts into a general pattern. I do not doubt the sincerity of the individual accounts. Sincerity and truth don't necessarily correlate well however. <edit> I saw that you expanded your post. Monkeys are as they are. Humans are no longer in the same situation as monkeys, even if I invoked the metaphor earlier. We have inherited behaviors evolved and optimized by/for life in scattered small groups and tribes. Many of these behaviors are maladaptive in a denser society that requires different mechanisms for our cooperation. So yes, I see developing a capacity to change our nature, to leave behind behaviors tuned to monkeyhood, to be a good thing. The alternative is to pitch ten thousand tears of social and technical progress and go neolithic. Ew.