No one in history has made it this far. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that, sure. But it’s a more humbling recognition of the human condition than I want to really accept. And it feels a bit like standing on the edge of a canyon looking into the abyss. “What lies beyond here?”
Why is the answer, in retrospect, so obvious, but the the near universal human desire to rail against such an answer, and resort to comforting imagination so passionate?
I am getting my arms around it and I do understand how, I think, but I don’t understand WHY yet. And I think that while I can reason it out from the evidence, that scientists will need to determine whether or not its genetic.
I always assume the HBD folks are overstating things. But I am beginning to think there is some truth to the ***tendency*** to bias very sophisticated ideas in certain directions just as strongly as we bias our behavior in justifying outright reproductive, and reproductively moral (reproductive strategy) directions.
If so, we are far more automatons than I really would like us to be.
I do not want all of our history of thought scientific, secular and mythical to be little more than a dance of justification to reach the nash equilibrium.
Depressing.