Theme: Agency

Curt Doolittle updated his status.

GENES DON’T CONSPIRE, THEY COMPETE, BLINDLY

There is no conspiracy among peoples with genetic and cultural homogeneity, any more than there is a conspiracy between women against men, or predators against prey, or competent against incompetent. We demonstrate differing degrees of neoteny, different moral intuitions, differing brain distributions, different endorphin distributions, and different morphology distributions for ancestral reasons. We all participate in the unconscious persistence of genetic, class, cultural, mythological, and institutional strategies. We can enumerate the properties of different group strategies, right down to the grammar of the speech and the methods of arguments, and the distributions of cognitive biases people and peoples use (which is one of the research programs what I work on). All of these properties and in group differences are both measureable at the individual and observable at the collective. One does not blame a dog for dragging it’s backside on the carpet. It’s a dog. One simply teaches the dog not to do so. One does not blame women for feminine cognitive biases and life preferences – they were an evolutionary necessity. One does not blame a competing group for pursuing it’s genetic interest at others expense – one simply creates norms, traditions, laws, institutions, and knowledge to prevent murder, violence, theft, fraud, fraud by omission, free riding, socialization of losses, privatization of commons, conspiracy, rent seeking, producing pseudoscience, pseudo-rationalism, propaganda, systemic lying, advocating or practicing moral and ethical irreciprocity, attempts at conversion, at institutional erosion, asymmetric reproduction, invasion, conquest, war, and genocide in either short term or long term means. Either a group can defend itself against destructive, parasitic and predatory competitors or it can’t. Groups compete. They compete by the means available to them. And groups learn to exploit every possible niche, from the most high trust, innovative, and productive, to the most low trust, parasitic, and destructive. But we cannot blame others for their immorality (free riding, parasitism and predation). We can only seek to defend ourselves against the immoral. There are no conspiracies. All our talk is just smoke and negotiation and deception on behalf of our genes. We are under the illusion that the rider drives the elephant, but the rider (our consciousness) is just a passenger on the elephant of our genes. Genes don’t conspire. They can’t.