h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>I don't steal - not even pencils from the office. Why not? I wouldn't get into trouble. If someone gives me too much change, I give it back.
Why?
There are one or two people I don't want to ever speak to again, but I am sure I wouldn't do anything to wipe them out, even if I knew I wouldn't get caught. Why not?<<

Because you know that you're better than that

" if social behaviour (including self-sacrifice) among a significant proportion of individuals confers a survival benefit to the parent community, the genes of those sacrificed may paradoxically be preferentially conserved."

Yes, that covers my own thoughts and reasonings on the matter. Particularly interesting given the theories that reciprocal altruism could be one of the driving forces behind our increased intelligence during our evolution.

"Within communities, humans are far more peaceful than those of our primate relatives."
Interesting statement, do you have any references or links for that? If true it is indeed worth noting. But could it also not be that we just don;t know that much about the social worekings of other primates? I mean, it wasn;t until a few years ago that it was discovered that chimpanzees will commit murder and mass beatings on members of their own social groups, as well as those of competing ones.

i guess i draw my morality from experience and ideology - with the two being interlinked. i regard myself as a socialist though not really a dogmatic or revolutionary socialist. more a pragmatic socialist following my own idiosyncratic doctrine . so i like to think i'm community minded (and i am active within my community - but not in an overtly political way), don't seek to gain advantage through disadvantaging others etc.

i certainly resent the idea that religion is somehow the source of morality, or a higher morality. plainly nonsense.

>> "Within communities, humans are far more peaceful than those of our primate relatives."
Interesting statement, do you have any references or links for that? <<

I've got to admit that the comment is pretty much verbatim from a recent documentary about human origins "Ultimate Survivor" on National Geographic hence not necessarily subject to due scrutiny.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/demonicmales.htm has some interesting material on African chimp colonies from ten years back and http://www.hbes.com/intro_to_field.htm is good for some links though mainly to offline material.

In the absence of definitive data to endorse the claim, I offer a little gedankenexperiment:

Could a species capable of domesticating such aggressive wild stock as wolves and aurochs to a state of manageable docility via selective breeding fail to apply the same rationale to its own communities?

OK, thanks for the links and references though!

"Could a species capable of domesticating such aggressive wild stock as wolves and aurochs to a state of manageable docility via selective breeding fail to apply the same rationale to its own communities?"

Not sure I understand what you are asking?
I mean, humans have tried to do this over the years in several different ways. Including through breeding. It's just that in this case the object of the schemes are self aware and got a bit uppity about it.

Would you want to be manageably docile?

Married, you mean?

I would also have to say that morals is just something any social species need. They develop in the same way that other behaviour does. And a species without could never function socially, so would probably die out. But the fact that humans have empathy and sentience will make it a bit different for us.

>> Not sure I understand what you are asking? <<

I you worried I might be a eugenicist, Ictoan?

Hmm. In that case wouldn't morals conflates with social rules, which are arbitrary?

Ictoan: What do you mean by social rules?

Things that society requires of its members.
Rules for coexistence. There can be a crossover with morals, but an unmoralistic society would still have rules for behaviour and interaction, social rules that applied in daily life.

Seth:
"worried I might be a eugenicist"
Not really It was more a case of looking at the question and thinking 'could a species be capable of..' and thinking 'yes, but that doesn;t really tell us much does it?' which made me think I was not understanding what you were asking.

>> And a species without could never function socially, so would probably die out <<

Aren't non-social species very much in the majority?

Plus social insects don't seem to have much by way of a social code - socially acceptable smells seem more important

Those 'socially acceptable smells' are their means of communicating the rules. We use words, they use smells. I think the rules are probably independant of the communication medium.
Plus it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to say that a particular species is a social animal and then say it doesn;t have a code. If there is no societal code then there is no society for there is nothing for the members to hold in common and, at the base level, identify 'us' from 'them'.

>> I don't steal - not even pencils from the office. <<

I do.
But only because I believe such pencils are meant to be stolen.
They are part of a well-thought-out and tried-and-true business system in which it has been predetermined (by experts) that such pencils will be stolen. These losses are already accounted for at the expense of higher wages, better working conditions or other considerations that can be held back (perhaps justifiably considering the work force is full of thieves).


~jwf~