Meeting on July 17

Lots of discussion:

1. Whether humans are "evolving" to a new level of altruism at the societal level--Ken Wilber wrote a book suggesting we're on a "brink" of something new. This also goes along with what we've probably mentioned at each meeting ... the idea (first from Julie's professor) that life is evolving towards greater cooperation. However, there is probably a distinction between biological evolution, and the cultural evolution that happens now that evolution gave us these brains to contemplate stuff like this. Similar to the distinction between genes and memes. Note: I was just now watching Robert Sapolsky's Great Courses lecture series on Biology and Human Behavior, and he pointed out that many of us were taught evolution by that old TV program Wild Kingdom, where the wildebeest, say, would "sacrifice himself" for the good of the species by letting the crocodiles eat him while the other wildebeest swam to safety. Sapolsky said that what the TV neglected to show us was that the wildebeest (or whatever other animal was featured) was probably the oldest one and got pushed into the water rather than sacrificing himself. Sapolsky says "evolution is not about evolving behaviors that optimize the survival of your species."

2. The origins of agriculture as a step towards a more difficult, if more secure life. As we have increases in technology such as agriculture, we are able to avoid or survive some of the smaller catastrophes (frequent famine), but the trade-off is that when we do have a catastrophe, it's bigger (we can't just pick up and move like the hunter-gatherers can, for example). (Idea from Brian Fagan, The Long Summer, and the concept of "trading up on the scale of vulnerability.")

3. If we have evidence that, say, sociopaths have innately different brains than the average, or that Einstein had particularily large and unusually shaped parietal lobules, what does that mean for us in terms of who we are (and how much pride or shame we can take in being that person)?

How much discretion did the “you” making the choices actually have if the outcome could have been predicted in advance, at least probablilistically, based on events that took place in your mother’s fallopian tubes decades ago?

(We had discussed this when we read The Blank Slate, too--the above quote is from page 51 of that book.)

TED video of neuroscientist Jim Fallon talking about psychopathic brains