Re: Evolutionary compassion
- From: Brian VanPelt <brvanpelt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2007 00:56:26 -0400 (EDT)
On Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:10:45 -0400 (EDT), "John W Edser"
<edser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Lorentz <drosen0000@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Aug 28, 2:06 am, Brian VanPelt <brvanp...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is it possible that compassion. or love, is something that has evolved
over time? If Darwin was correct, and if it is possible that
compassion/love were to have evolved, then why would it be in our best
interest to have compassion/love?
He pointed out that in terms of the naive "survivor of the
fittest" model, there is no value in a dog taking care of a cat. Cats
and dogs are not natural friends, and may even have a few antagonistic
instincts. However, the dog took care of the kittens and showed
extreme affection for it. He even claimed that the dog continue to
show affection for the kittens well into adulthood.
I have heard the argument that the dog didn't really show
compassion. She merely thought the kittens were her puppies. However,
that is pretty silly. It gives her too much credit for way too much
intelligence. She didn't know the difference between kittens and
puppies.
JE:-
The probability that a dog will find itself in a situation where it ends up
accidentally nursing kittens in the wild is just about zero. This means that
nature has never needed to provide a dog with an expensive cognitive
mechanism, or even a much cheaper emotional filter, which allows it to
separate a nursing pup from a nursing kitten. In fact, the opposite is the
case. African hunting dogs have been selected to feed and look after each
others young because these animals hunt in cooperative packs. They need a
reserve of trained young to replace any injured adults who may not be able
to make the hunt. Because dogs are small compared to say a lion, they hunt
together in an intelligent way to bring down prey much larger than
themselves. This means they remain vulnerable to inefficient hunting
whenever injury removes even one member from the hunting pack. Given a full
hunting pack African hunting dogs are the best hunters in Africa. In our
early evolution we learned to hunt from them and with them forming an
emotional association which lasts to this day. So, is a dog nursing a cat
being compassionate? That depends on how you define "compassion". My
definition: a _cognitive_ understanding of the plight of another. It would
appear to me that this is not the case with regard to this dog nursing
kittens. Is the dog acting in an altruistic way? Again this depends on your
definition. My definition: any payment to another which ends up as a net
loss AND NOT A NET GAIN for the proposed altruist. You will find the Neo
Darwinists do not define altruism in this way (if they bother to define it
at all). My definition can easily discriminate between an investment and a
donation. However, common Neo Darwinian usage cannot do so rendering their
use of it as ambiguous. It should be noted that the only way a donation can
be differentiated from an investment within biology is when a fitness
becomes proposed which can act as a critical Galilean frame of reference.
Galileo was the first to point out that the relative movement of the sun to
the earth cannot be made sense of without a constant frame of reference,
e.g. a fixed star. The mere fact that the sun appears to move from an
earth's eye view does not mean anything. Exactly the same rationale applies
to ANY relative opposite measure (zero sum game) which is this case is a
donor and any recipient of the donation. Unless a frame of reference is
defined all you can measure is the relative difference of something but you
cannot say which remains larger or smaller anymore than you can say which
was moving and which was not moving. The same argument applies to
empirically differentiating between "selfishness" and "altruism". Without a
critical frame of reference all you can measure is the size of the payment.
What you cannot separate is the entity which donated the payment from any
entity that received it as a zero sum, i.e. you cannot differentiate the
supposed altruist from those behaving in a selfish way where one always
requires the other simply because you cannot have an altruistic individual
without an equally but opposite selfish individual as a zero sum game. If
you examine Hamilton's Rule on which the evolution of altruism within nature
remains based, it does not include a single constant term which can act as
this critically missing frame of reference. This being the case the rule
cannot differentiate the lock from the key, i.e. an altruistic donor from an
entirely selfish recipient any more than you can separate the earth centric
solar system from a sun centric solar system without a fixed star acting as
the refutable frame of reference. The missing fitness which can act as this
missing, critical, constant frame of reference within any Neo Darwinian
simplified/oversimplified model is Total Darwinian Fitness (TDF). This is
defined as: the total number of adult fertile forms reproduced per parent,
per population. The test of this to refutation as a fitness frame of
reference: all evolution by natural selection must halt within one
population, if and only if, the TDF of each member of that population
remains the same. In nature this hardly ever happens so an experiment is
required. This as just a thought experiment should be able to demonstrate to
anybody who remains reasonable that TDF represents the only valid frame of
reference that the science of biology has. In order to be able to
empirically discriminate between an altruistic individual who doing the
donating and the selfish recipient TDF has to be proposed as a critical
frame. In this case the TDF of the altruist must fall as it rises for the
selfish recipient. If the TDF of both increase then no altruism is evident,
just mutualism. In the case where both fall then spite has been demonstrated
which cannot be selected for. In Darwinian terms TDF cannot be _selected to
fall_, just increase. This means that at all times parents are selected
maximise their own TDF. This is termed a MAXIMAND, i.e. evolution by natural
selection remains fuelled entirely by each parent maximising just their own
TDF's where mostly, this happens of a TDF mutual increase basis. The maximal
velocity of c within Einstein's E= Mc^2 represents a maximand (the maximal
velocity of light in a vacuum) which provided a refutable frame for his
theory. TDF is the only frame which can separate mutualism from either
altruism or selfishness on a refutable basis within Neo Darwinian models,
yet it remains ignored.
The mess that gene centric Neo Darwinism has gotten itself into over the
last half century or so, only because it insists to this day that no frame
of reference is required to be able to separate these key issues of
evolutionary biology within any osimplified/oversimplified model, is the
same mess that economics and politics based on the same hopeless
proposition (a refutable frame of reference is never required to be able to
separate relative opposing issues) has gotten us into historically, e.g. the
book keeping excesses of Enron accounting which failed to separate the
relative issue of debits from credits. Reasoning without an assumed,
refutable frame of reference can only represent 100% prejudiced PRE GALILEAN
reasoning.
Regards,
John Edser
Independent Researcher
edser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
First off, let me say that I am thrilled that the biologists would let
a mathematician even have an opinion that would not be condemned as
stupid and senseless as is common in the math newsgroups (it appears
that we math folk are an egomaniacal breed). Maybe it's because we
were routinely beat up by the cool kids that we have developed a
defense mechanism that is critical of any way of thought but our own.
Anyways, the dog taking care of the cats and other ideas have really
got me thinking hard about what we are, our choices and behaviors and,
most importantly, why we make those choices. Do we always make
choices that are in our best interest, in whatever sense that may be?
Are there generations of stupid choices, but in the long run, the good
choices outweigh the bad ones? It's hard to say what I mean here, but
is evolution about that? I have seen people mention that evolution
comes about by direct choices that immediately impact a particular
generation. I am not sure that I have seen an argument suggest that a
choice might impact a future generation but not a generation in the
immediate future. But I am ignorant to biology and the technical
language may well be confusing me.
Now, there have been cases where one species has cared for other
species for a variety of reasons (as several have pointed out), and it
seems that happenstance has always been the reason they have united.
Also, any nature show on TV has shown that, most often, when
conflicting species collide, one or both species doesn't fair well.
Why would a dog care for a cat when the chance occurs? Why would a
cat care for a dog?
Would an ant care for an elephant? Or is that just too silly to
comprehend?
What, exactly, is possible or impossible from an evolutionary
standpoint? Or is this question even possible to try to answer? How
stupid of a question is it?
The irony is that in math, we often talk about infinity, but our math
is quite limited to a few things. Nature is more infinite than we
might think and I believe we are kidding ourselves into thinking we
might have a handle on any reasonable view of how things really are.
So, I can't seem to figure out why we math people are so egotistical
when we only have a handle on such a small portion of the world.
Thanks for reading,
Brian
.
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