A few gems and interesting trains of thought from this chapter:
1) Robert Nozicks argues thusly in favor of vegetarianism:
2) Now follow this. The anthropologist George P. Murdock compiled a list of characteristics which seem to be present in every human culture that has been recorded by history and ethnography:
Wilson observes that if ANTS were endowed with the capacity for rationalization while maintaining their current societal framework, then their societies would exhibit the following characteristics:
3) Closer to us now, Wilson writes how chimps are similar to humans anatomically and physiologically. They are extremely social, with complex social behavior; they learn and use tools, and they have distinct culture. They can learn vocabularies of two hundred English words and basic syntax and invent new expressions. They can be taught self-awareness. An interesting thing to consider, which at this point still separates them from humans, is the unawareness of mortality, the concept of personal death. Premack writes: "What if, like man, the ape dreads death and will deal with this knowledge as bizzarely as we have? [...] Until I can suggest concrete steps in teaching the concept of death without fear, I have no intention of imparting the knowledge of mortality to the ape."
Certainly a chimp is made aware of death when a fellow chimp dies, but he appears to have no awareness, as of yet, of the inevitability of his own death. Isn't that a strange idea? - to think that all of us, as children, pass through a stage when we become aware of our own mortality, and that chimps never reach this stage (for now). Are they like a collective proto-Adam, who has not been tainted by the fruit of the tree of knowledge?
4) A central point to Wilson's book, and to sociobiology in general, is that much of human nature is genetically determined; and, furthermore, that "the traits of humans nature were adaptive during the time that the human species evolved and that genes consequently spread through the population that predisposed their carriers to develop those traits."
A specific case he examines is the incest taboo, which is universal throughout human cultures. Everywhere it is forbidden and punished by cultural sanctions, and yet, at the same time, there is a deeper, psychological sanction in the case of sibling incest: the fact that "a sexual aversion automatically develops between persons who have lived together when one or all grew to the age of six." That this psychological phenomenon has evolved within human nature may be explained by the fact that it is to our evolutionary advantage to avoid inbreeding; inbreeding, of course, leads to severe genetic abnormalities and other pathologies including physical deformity and mental defects. This is because, on estimate,
(to be continued...)
1) Robert Nozicks argues thusly in favor of vegetarianism:
Human beings justify the eating of meat on the grounds that the animals we kill are too far below us in sensitivity and intelligence to bear comparison. It follows that if representatives of a truly superior extraterrestrial species were to visit Earth and apply the same criterion, they could proceed to eat us in good conscience.Could we apply the same reasoning to plants as well? What about jellyfish, or sea anemones, or other plant-like animals? There's a large gray area here....
2) Now follow this. The anthropologist George P. Murdock compiled a list of characteristics which seem to be present in every human culture that has been recorded by history and ethnography:
Age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organization, cooking, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labor, dream interpretation, education, eschatology (theological ideas related to death and the afterlife), ethics, ethnobotany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, firemaking, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift giving, government, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool making, trade, visiting, weaving, and weather control.Now, how many of these characteristics would you say are unique to humankind? How many are the outcome of advanced social lives and high intelligence? In a related question, how many of these characteristics are inevitable within an intelligent and complexly organized society?
Wilson observes that if ANTS were endowed with the capacity for rationalization while maintaining their current societal framework, then their societies would exhibit the following characteristics:
Age-grading, antennal rites, body licking, calendar, cannibalism, caste determination, cast laws, colony-foundation rules, colony organization, cleanliness training, communal nurseries, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, division of labor, drone control, education, eschatology, ethics, etiquette, euthanasia, firemaking, food taboos, gift giving, government, greetings, grooming rituals, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, language, larval care, law, medicine, metamorphosis rites, mutual regurgitation, nursing castes, nuptial flights, nutrient eggs, population policy, queen obeisance, residence rules, sex determination, soldier castes, sisterhoods, status differentiation, sterile workers, surgery, symbiont care, tool making, trade, visiting, and weather control....An observation which brings us down a notch on the totem pole, though not without its questionable areas (cosmology and firemaking?).
3) Closer to us now, Wilson writes how chimps are similar to humans anatomically and physiologically. They are extremely social, with complex social behavior; they learn and use tools, and they have distinct culture. They can learn vocabularies of two hundred English words and basic syntax and invent new expressions. They can be taught self-awareness. An interesting thing to consider, which at this point still separates them from humans, is the unawareness of mortality, the concept of personal death. Premack writes: "What if, like man, the ape dreads death and will deal with this knowledge as bizzarely as we have? [...] Until I can suggest concrete steps in teaching the concept of death without fear, I have no intention of imparting the knowledge of mortality to the ape."
Certainly a chimp is made aware of death when a fellow chimp dies, but he appears to have no awareness, as of yet, of the inevitability of his own death. Isn't that a strange idea? - to think that all of us, as children, pass through a stage when we become aware of our own mortality, and that chimps never reach this stage (for now). Are they like a collective proto-Adam, who has not been tainted by the fruit of the tree of knowledge?
4) A central point to Wilson's book, and to sociobiology in general, is that much of human nature is genetically determined; and, furthermore, that "the traits of humans nature were adaptive during the time that the human species evolved and that genes consequently spread through the population that predisposed their carriers to develop those traits."
A specific case he examines is the incest taboo, which is universal throughout human cultures. Everywhere it is forbidden and punished by cultural sanctions, and yet, at the same time, there is a deeper, psychological sanction in the case of sibling incest: the fact that "a sexual aversion automatically develops between persons who have lived together when one or all grew to the age of six." That this psychological phenomenon has evolved within human nature may be explained by the fact that it is to our evolutionary advantage to avoid inbreeding; inbreeding, of course, leads to severe genetic abnormalities and other pathologies including physical deformity and mental defects. This is because, on estimate,
each person carries an average of four lethal gene equivalents: either four genes that cause death outright when in the homozygous state, eight genes that cause death in fifty percent of homozygotes, or other, arithmetically equivalent combinations of lethal and debilitating effects.So, in the bizarre situation in which you were able to produce both sperm and eggs, and somehow impregnated yourself, your child would die, statistically speaking, 100% of the time (1/4 chance of homozygosity for each of 4 genes). If, instead, you were to inbreed with a close relative, results are unsurprisingly similar.
(to be continued...)
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