From: throopw@sheol.UUCP (Wayne Throop)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Holden, Nietzsche, and evolution
Summary: references for altrusim in evolution, how view of humans as primates can lead to insight
Date: 15 Dec 92 01:35:59 GMT

: From: news@fedfil.UUCP (news) (Ted Holden)
: Message-ID: <171@fedfil.UUCP>
: From everything which we can directly observe and come to any general
: consensus about, man's nature would appear to be much as Nietzsche and
: later students of psychology have described it.  There are the three
: basic drives of food, sex, and sleep, and above them if you believe
: Nietzsche, the will to power.  And if you accept evolution, then all of
: this is quite natural and even possibly desirable. 

The above is basically gibberish.  We can see that Ted is completely
innocent of even the simplest facts about evolutionary theory, by the
"nature red in tooth and claw", "survival of the fittest", "the powerful
exploit the weak" caricature he alludes to above.  Not to mention the
laughable simplification of psychology into a handful of "drives".  And,
of course, "desirable" is not a conclusion that can be legitimately
drawn from evolutionary theory, not even "possibly". 

Evolutionary theory models cooperation just as easily as competition,
dominance and "will to power", as anybody must realize if they know
anything about the evolutionary account of the nucleus or organelles in
cells, or anything about the evolutionary account of multicellular
organisms.

Further, even between multicellular organisms, cooperation and
altruistic behavior is a large part of evolutionary theory, as the
myriads of citations to Hamilton's paper providing a mathematical model
for the evolution of cooperation clearly demonstrates.  This is the
general field that predicted the naked mole rat before the actual
animal was discovered.

Further still, Axelrod's work with evolutionary models and simulations
of Prisoner-Dilemma style situations, showing that cooperative
strategies are not only stable, but are MORE stable than competitive
strategies in some specific ways is very widely quoted.  There are
popular accounts of this work, for example in Hofstader's
_Metamagical_Themas_, or in Dawkins'  _The_Selfish_Gene_.

Ted's caricature of evolutionary theory doesn't even BEGIN to resemble
the actuality of the field.

And if one insists on a "there are two accounts of human behavior" style
of thought, a much more useful way of looking at this split than Ted's
rather pointless brutal/spiritual accounts, would be the baboon-like
and chimpanzee-like accounts.  Apropos of this, consider this
paraphrase of a definition from Robert Anton Wilson's
_Shrodinger's_Cat_ series:

    God: a mythical being created by a recent primate species
         on earth to account for origins, because they just couldn't 
         imagine all this stuff lying around without an alpha male 
         in charge of it.

And finally, if you are familiar with the popularizations of Goodall's
work, you will probably realize why I am led to suspect that Velikovsky
is simply Ted's version of an empty gasoline can.

Always assuming Ted's not pulling our collective leg, of course.



Afterthought:
: Amongst other things, telepathic communication is a common thread in
: almost all such descriptions [..of near-death experiences..]. 

Where does THIS come from?  The classic symptoms I've seen reported
in the Skeptical Inquirer are OOBE (especially viewpoint above body), 
tunnel, light, euphoria, greetings and "overexposed" images.  Where
did any reports of telepathy come into it?
--
Wayne Throop  ...!mcnc!dg-rtp!sheol!throopw