Posted by ShaunS on
URL: https://coalpha.arkian.net/Fun-times-with-Mr-FS-tp7574642p7576374.html

Well this is very sad, isn't it?

I'm sure no one will thank me for dragging this thread up to the top of the list. Also this is a couple of years old so many of the views expressed will have changed by now. It needs more study and this will take some time but there are some obvious points here worth making.

A person will view the world. What they see will determine whether they think that the world is a good place or a bad place. The person that experiences only good things happening to them will take the view that it's a wonderful world, but if we ask the homeless drunk he will tell us what a terrible world it really is. The squashed hedgehog whose carcass lays flattened on the road (with blood oozing out of it) - knew that the world was a bad place, but the rest of us have the Green Cross Code (that's not culture, that's education). You then have the difficulty of describing the horrible world to someone who thinks that it's wonderful, and when you have finished they think that you have Nazi tendencies or you are a Psycho of some kind. It is the lowest common denominator that determines the truth. The world is indeed a bad place, but as the dominant species we have learnt to defeat it, but with varying degrees of success. We now measure the world based on our own experiences as a race, rather than through the eyes of lesser species and this tends to colour our view of the world. The person who thinks that the world is a wonderful place has simply lived a sheltered life where they have been shielded from it's full impact.

Evolution doesn't care about culture. It is a very important truth here that quantity does indeed beat quality. In the case of evolution the quality is encapsulated within the quantity. Where there is some quality it is presumed to produce greater quantity. In terms of survival it is always the greater in number that are most likely to prevail. The bigger tribe defeats the smaller tribe (a point that governments would do well to realise). The French Revolution springs to mind here. It doesn't matter that the greater quantity may be more immoral and in fact they would probably win out due to their immorality. Further more most visitors to this forum couldn't give a fig about evolution. It doesn't help them and it cannot help them, but it may provide some historic context. It has been said that we may not be around to see the end result, so whatever that is, is largely irrelevant.

Evolution has been used as a justification for arguments around changing the culture. These arguments are very poor. It's a patsy isn't it? Before genes were discovered selection was the key feature and this came from farming animals. The best interpretation is that it lends credibility to arranged marriages as a useful scheme.

Morality - the animals don't really have any so it isn't really affecting evolution. Good and Evil - are taken to be aspects that are beyond the human level and the human is merely a slightly better animal. Good refers to Gods and Angels, Evil refers to Devils and Demons. Neither Good nor Evil can be said to be an appropriate term for use to describe humans. The function of Evil is to kill, it is anti-life, so some human activity can be classified as evil but the Evil itself must come from an external (isolated) source.

The people that succeed do so because they have learnt to defeat the world by resisting it's horrible nature, and the methods of doing so are the key features of value. The requirement then, is to discover ways and means of resolving the targeting aspects of the world, while at the same time enhancing the targeting aspects of potential mates. Clearly the requirement is for a personal solution as the ideology of a cultural solution won't be achieved rapidly enough. On the one hand you need to avoid the world but on the other hand you need to be visible to the opposite sex, and it is these two qualities combined that drives evolution and procreation.