2010-04-13
I agree with you that the book "On Genetic Interests" is important for our cause; at that the reader himself is better off with it. "Mathematical Models of Social Evolution" von Richard McElreath and Robert Boyd, which need some mathematical knowledge to be read, could make its theoretical fundament. The question why this books are not more disseminated among us holds also for the sociobiologie and the theoretical biology, the more that they are suspect to our opponent. Part of the answer is that theoretical biology needs a knowledge of mathematic which is not common in political science yet. At the bottom of sociobiology is the modelisation of the question which men have always asked, and with Jean-Jacques Rousseau says:[The social contract] can arise only where several persons come together: but, as the force and liberty of each man are the chief instruments of his self-preservation, how can he pledge them without harming his own interests, and neglecting the care he owes himself?
The answer is one that cast to one side the golden rules, if taken for absolut, or Kant's categorical imperative, and does not please everyone: A point of view is that the genotype directs the phenotype, but the reversal of the sight allows saying that the phenotype embeded in its cultur determines the genotype (through selection). Genotype and phenotyp determine each another. In the modelisation of the social evolution there is also two points of view which are connected through nepotism, or inclusiv fitness, which is, in some opinion, not the reason of cooperation but rather its mean. The one is the cooperation throught reciprocal interest, a concept that is often demonstrated with the prisoner dilema, and the other is the multilevel group selection. For both it holds, that the altruism, the substance with which the good will is made of, needs a selectiv environment on a higher level of organisation: The interplay of the genes needs that the individual survives in his whole, the love that the familie continue, the family the group, and the group the species. Hence, the altruism among etnies holds only in reference of the humankind as selection unit which could fail like any other species too. By the way, the extention of this concept till the species, or above, the natur on earth in the whole, is rather theoretical, because species do not exist in a great multitude. Usualy, a survival instinct above the group is not considered as existing.
What in the faustian cultur is out of reach is known and sure now: a civilization is not adaptive. This knowledge is paralysing, at least as long as it is not fully assimilated, and its dissimulation an advantage for the truth, if the truth is understood as a psychological object to direct the action of a group on changing targets or to sustain the group's genetical isolation for instances. The overcoming of the unattainable, from which you speak about, will happen through the dividing in eternity, in space according to that, where the composition of the separated must be in some way fortuitous, like the distribution of the chromosome in the course of the meiose, because it is one of the generative principle of altruism. So, the man of tomorrow will not grow up from one civilization, but from a multitude of different successions of them, a multitude of distinct civilizational path. What will rise is the beauty of his woman and the felicity to be allowed to die for her; but also the care for the coming white child, and the mercy, where he will have his home, filling the space with light. Unwise were actions derived from ideas which do not differentiate among the time scales, from generation to aeon.
Henry Steyer