🚀 go-pugleaf

John McCarthy wrote:

> "Starbuck" <pmdlandarch@earthlink.net> writes:
>
> > >>>I would argue that we need to pay a lot of attention to consequences in
> > the modern world, and not rely on recipies that were perhaps useful
> > thousands or millions of years ago.<<<
> >
> > That is something worthwhile to keep in mind.
> >
> > On the other hand, Cromagnon man is Cromagnon man.  Despite our
> > technological progress (and our pride), we really aren't significantly
> > differant beings from our ancestors 150,000 years ago.
>
> The difference may not be significant to you, but they are important
> to me.  I would not have done well in a Cro-Magnon world.

Like many people, I had appendicitis as a child, so I would not have
survived before modern medicine.

The key point here is that we have "old" neural circuitry in our heads,
circuitry that mostly evolved long before agriculture.

Take xenophobia, for example. There's a good likelihood that it is quite
a bit older than the Pleistocene. Jane Goodall's chimps patrol the borders
of their territories and often have bloody conflicts with neighboring groups;
they exhibit behavior that could be homologous to human xenophobia.
If it is, that puts the origin of our xenophobia back something like 5-7
million
years, in the Miocene. It could of course be even older.

Why does xenophobia exist at all? Probably as a behavioral mechanism
supporting territoriality: these resources belong to *our* (related!) genes.
You aliens, with your (relatively) unrelated genes, are not welcome to our
resources,  and we will eject you or kill you if try take them.

There are more recondite possibilities, such as tuning gene-flow rates,
but the territoriality aspect is probably at least  part of the reason.

So it is not too much of a mystery why we would have this trait. But how
well does this emotional bias work in a global economy based (increasingly)
on information? It gives us Kosovos, not  Silicon Valleys.

Xenophobia is not the handiwork of a God, any more than is sickle cell anemia.
It is a product of natural selection, adaptive under the conditions that made
it.
If the conditions change - as they have for us -- a trait may no longer be
adaptive. It may even be very maladaptive, as xenophobia is for us today.

--
Alan McGowen