Re: Apple II and God (was Re: Notice to Scott Gamon)

[pubpc1@library.ucla.edu]

amitai.schlair@usa.net (Amitai Schlair) wrote,
in response to Rubywand:
>>      On the whole, it would be unfair to pick apart Heinlein's statement.
>> Obviously, it is intended to convey an ideal. It is intended to be extreme and
>> to be understood as intended to be extreme.
>
>And that is the beauty of it! Can you picture a world in which this
>ideal is in universal practice? I, for one, do my best to adhere to a
>similar credo; Nathan, whatever my disagreements with whatever his
>religious beliefs may be, does pretty damn well too.

The problem is that he does not always stick to facts himself when
he attacks others.  That's hypocrisy.

>
>It seems you are drawing an invisible demarcation between "ideal" and
>"real," "extreme" and "practicable." This distinction is a perfect
>example of the power of the human mind, in that it exists because people
>have thought that it exists. If one chooses ideals that are irrational
>and impracticable, i.e., religious teachings and their secular
>outgrowths of "charity" etc., then obviously one is going to encounter a
>sort of peripateia in which this divergence of worlds occurs. It's
>entirely self-wrought. Because I reject those ideals, I haven't
>encountered any such problems other than the deadening numerical
>majority of my philosophical opponents. Sometimes that's hard... but I'm
>young and stubborn and I'll make it.

You sound like an Objectivist.

Charity in the sense of altruism, I believe, is biologically based.

Objectivists say that it is natural for individuals to be selfish.
Here is the problem: a biological organism's natural state is dictated
by its genes.

Biologists recognize the fact that it is the genes that are selfish.
Only the genes have the power to reproduce themselves and pass on
to the next generation.  The individual is transient.  In most cases,
the selfishness of the gene has the same effect as selfishness in the
individual, but there is a situation where this is different: kin.

The term is "kin selection" and it leads to the bond between family.
Imagine a gene that codes for a self-sacrificing behavior (such as
a call to warn others of predators, which results in the predator
eating the individual).  If I had a gene to alarm call and get
myself eaten in the process of saving you, the gene will not get
passed on and the behavior is extinguished in the next generation.
So far, so good.  However, what if my entire family of three children
is in danger?  Each child has, based on probability, 1/2 of my genes.
This means that they have 1/2 the probability of having the altruism
gene.  My relatedness to myself is 1 and to each of my children is
1/2.  If I sacrifice myself and save them, that's 3*(1/2)-1=1/2 better
than saving myself and sacrificing them.  Thus, those individuals
with the altruism gene will spread among successive generations.

An altruism gene does not manifest itself by doing math.  Rather, it
is a feeling.  What we call "love" is actually this manifestation.
But how do we know that it is our relatives we are saving?  In nature,
a relative is usually someone near us, that's how.  In any case, this
behavior has the effect of propagating the gene, which codes for the
behavior.

The crux of the matter boils down to: a selfish altruisic gene's need
to survive and outcompete other genes results in kin altruism in
individuals.

Those who express charity for strangers is simply extending this
behavior unconsciously to include non-relatives.  That is, the mechanism
that usually leads us to sacrifice for our kin is not 100% effective
at excluding non-kin.  This happens in animals too.  Stick an egg in
most bird's nest and the bird will "adopt" the chick because it has
an instictive need to react to gaping mouths by feeding them.  Like
human beings, sometimes others take advantage of this fact.  The
cuckoo, for example, has evolved to sneak into other birds nests and
replace one of the host bird's eggs with its own.  Similarly, some
human beings take advantage of the charitable nature of people.

This is really starting to get off topic for this newsgroup, but I
felt your position deserved a comment.  Before you stick to your
philosophy for life, read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins
before deciding that altruism originated from religion.

-Scott G.