Ravage the land as never before. Total destruction from mountain to shore.

[henwy]

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Hurricane Irene has now arrived in New Jersey. Actually, it's probably been here for a while already, or at least its edges have been. The actual eye of the hurricane won't pass over for at least several more hours yet though it's been raining off and on since the late afternoon. From what I can tell, it doesn't look like it's going to turn out to

Comments

[barking_iguana]

Natural selection, or rather its adjunct sexual selection, is indeed at work. Risk taking serves the same reproductive purpose as a huge, almost worthless lobster claw you have to drag around. They are unconsciously advertising that if they can survive being that stupid, they must be robust.

[henwy]

Eh. As far as I'm concerned, that's just a post-hoc, recursive argument which evolutionary psych is prone to. The fact is that we don't face the evolutionary pressures we used to. The recursive part is that you can argue that new ones have cropped up, but that usually goes against the common layman idea of natural selection to begin with. Maybe one of the fringe benefits of forming a society is so that stupidity isn't as severely punished or selected against, but I'm not sure that's always a good thing.

[barking_iguana]

I'm pretty sure knowledge of sexual selection entailing obvious disadvantages to prove erstwhile viability goes back to Darwin, not latter-day evolutionary psychologists, but I don't know if you're challenging the whole idea or just when it manifests by young human males braving danger.

In any case, the length of time that staying out of harms way has been relatively unimportant is too short to have much of an impact on the gene pool by probably more than an order of magnitude.

[henwy]

What I'm arguing is that evolutionary psychology/biology has a tendancy to Beg the Question. I mean that in its real usage, not what it's erroneously become in modern parlance. You assume that every behavior that exists has an evolutionary benefit or is tied to something which does because, after all, it exists. If it wasn't beneficial or tied to something beneficial, it wouldn't have been selected for all these eons and thus, wouldn't exist. It's been argued that evolutionary biologists (and some anthros) are basically the opposite of scientists who have a problem, gather evidence and find a solution. Evolutionary biologists are given an answer, and then gather evidence to find the question.

[socarefully]

Hahaha.....
I always tell people I am not having kids as I want to make the world a better place.

[henwy]

The scary part is that intelligence is inversely correlated with number of children you have. So the brighter you are (not to mention the richer and more educated) the less likely you are to spawn. I'm not sure that's a winning combination either.

[socarefully]

This partly explains why all the not so intelligent guys like to try and chat up girls...whist the brighter ones are harder to find.