The implications of Evolution

'Bene' is Latin for 'good'. By whom? Most evolutionists I have read the work of actively reject this concept. This isn't about objective 'good'. It is asserting that we can learn cooperative behaviours outside of a particular type of framework. It is a repudiation of the notion that one needs 'God' to be good. Who is making this presumption? You mean culture? It has helped us become rather successful as a species, but a lot of strange stuff has piggybacked along for the ride, for sure. One of the benefits of having a brain, which evolved. It wasn't. Seems to have come in handy, if you'll excuse the pun. Fortunate we evolved complex brains and dexterous hands isn't it? The general has been evolved for.
The specific has been learned.We have evolved to learn language to communicate, but we have not evolved to learn English.That's the sense we can describe the majority of what we do as evolved or adapted for. In many cases you can't, which is why very few people do, and those that try are often criticized. I'm not sure you understand what a spandrel is. The whiteness of bones is a spandrel. They are white as a function of the materials used, not because bone colour is selected for. The appendix is not a spandrel, it played a more important role in our evolutionary history, and still does things - but its non-essential.A spandrel, is the space under the stairs. It's not something specifically intended, its just a function of the basic structure of a stairway. A coal store under the stairs is probably a vestigial feature of an old house which used to be heated through coal fires. Right. But this is a well known phenomena and publishing a paper with a just-so story in it is likely to result in a lot of criticism.There are times when someone says 'How could this have evolved? It makes no sense!?' and someone might reply 'Well perhaps this, or this or even this...sometimes evolution finds solutions that seem counter-intuitive and dismissing evolution on the grounds that you can't imagine how is myopic', but this is just illustrative - a means to demonstrating that evolution isn't as simple as 'survival of the fittest'.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Data + interpretation in light of a theory = evidence.You can interpret data in many ways. This is well known. With disclaimers from above: Indeed. There are some things such as 'music', 'language', 'sexuality' and the like, for which we have yet to combine sufficient levels of data with good enough theory for a consensus view to emerge. But so what? This is true of murder enquiries, evolution, medicine, psychology, astronomy, particle physics...and well all human endeavours to be frank. There is little, if anything which is absolutely settled. There are some things which have more confidence about than others, and some things we are pretty sure are completely wrong.

Or indeed, a commonly agreed description. Not at all, but if it isn't it means one has a lot of extra explaining to do. It is expected, that is all. Our minds gives us the free rein to speculate. Science is about speculating and attempting to strengthen or weaken speculations. That'd be nice. Unfortunately before you can get there, you have to do a lot of work, and this can mean speculations and arguing. Which is, of course, easier said than done. Well, not quite. An evolutionary explanation would be an explanation that utilizes evolutionary theory to provide a causal account for whatever it is. I don't see why one needs to include consciousness at all. Is there some reason philosophical zombies {or non-conscious organisms in general} are prohibited from being attracted to organisms of the same sex? Showing how homosexuality might continue to exist, in the face of evolutionary forces which seem - on the face of it - to inhibit homosexuality, may require looking for benefits above and beyond individual reproduction. This isn't to say 'this explains homosexuality' so much as 'this explains why homosexuality can exist and be to some extent heritable, despite what may appear to be, a reduction in the fecundity of the individual's concerned'. I think you might be looking at this backwards. I agree, but I think you have let even more subtleties pass you by along the way too.

Are you sure? If they were talking about neutrons, then 'isotone' may have been the correct word. Or indeed Richard Dawkins who wrote a rather famous book back in the 70s called 'The Selfish Gene' which provided a rather sound and easy to understand evolutionary argument to this effect. Do you have some particular disagreement with it?Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Sure. You were talking about explaining homosexuality generally though. Not YOUR homosexuality specifically. Naturally, but then what is 'conscious lust'? I'm not reducing anything or declaring anything irrelevant. I am saying that evolutionary theory is about the general. The specifics such as a certain case of being assaulted aren't really something evolutionary theory is for. Sure, one could point to the evolution of in-group and out-group behaviour, citing other examples within humanity such as race, language or culture. Or even point to other primates, or even other mammals or go wider to the animal kingdom at large.But evolutionary theory isn't for explaining why Tony punched you for looking at his legs in a certain way. Much of that would be learned behaviour from an individual perspective, and evolution deals with populations not individuals. As previously said, we may explain why there Tony's behaviour is so unfortunately prevalent with reference to both culture and evolutionary theory, but there's no point trying to explain why I caught the cold on Wednesday using Germ Theory. It's just not what it is for. You have avoided the part where I told you were looking at it backwards. I don't claim to explain through evolution why you found Tony's legs eye-catching in the morning, but by the afternoon you found him repulsive.I can explain how homosexuality may persist in a population despite the fact that it may reduce fecundity - which would seem to run counter to what is predicted by evolutionary theory. There is a world of difference between these things.If, for instance, as a side effect of increased fecundity there happens to be occasional homosexual children - the trade-off from an evolutionary perspective may pay for itself.However, this doesn't explain why Tony's legs are so lovely. Right back at you. Dennet and I are in broad agreement (largely because much of what I am saying is inspired by him):

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Today, though, I’m going to talk about Darwin’s other strange inversion, which is equally puzzling at first, but in some ways just as important. It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. We adore babies because they’re so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny.

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This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why. Let’s start with sweet. Our sweet tooth is basically an evolved sugar detector, because sugar is high energy, and it’s just been wired up to the preferer, to put it very crudely, and that’s why we like sugar. Honey is sweet because we like it, not "we like it because honey is sweet." There’s nothing intrinsically sweet about honey. If you looked at glucose molecules till you were blind, you wouldn’t see why they tasted sweet. You have to look in our brains to understand why they’re sweet. So if you think first there was sweetness, and then we evolved to like sweetness, you’ve got it backwards; that’s just wrong. It’s the other way round. Sweetness was born with the wiring which evolved.

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And there’s nothing intrinsically sexy about these young ladies. And it’s a good thing that there isn’t, because if there were, then Mother Nature would have a problem: How on earth do you get chimps to mate? Now you might think, ah, there’s a solution: hallucinations. That would be one way of doing it, but there’s a quicker way. Just wire the chimps up to love that look, and apparently they do. That’s all there is to it. Over six million years, we and the chimps evolved our different ways. We became bald-bodied, oddly enough; for one reason or another, they didn’t. If we hadn’t, then probably this would be the height of sexiness.

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It's more complicated than that, by several orders of magnitude. The origin of morality is not altruism, that makes little sense. Altruistic behaviour has an evolutionary explanation, and altruistic behaviour + culture + communication leads to social contracts etc etc. I can't speak on Bloom, but I know Harris claims absolute and objective morals, but he's wrong. But yes, most animals have 'hardwired behaviours' as well as 'learned behaviours'. Vampire bats share food, meerkats lookout for predators at the cost of their own safety etc. That isn't to say sharing food is objectively good, it's just a strategy that can be evolutionarily advantageous in a situation where mutualism exists.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Wait, how do you know homosexuality is an evolved adaptation? We don't need the theory of evolution. It's way too much firepower.Humans are attracted to other humans. Humans are complex and development doesn't always go in the direction that is optimal for survival. Development includes brain development, which can develop depression, mania, a keen mathematical mind, good or bad linguistic capacity. There, we're done. That was easy.Homosexuality is the result of environmental factors in early development, possibly in some cases pre-natal development. I have a reference to a study on my Kindle (currently out of power but I can get it if you need) that show exposing pregnant mice to heightened levels of a certain hormone can result in male mice being attracted to female mice but 'presenting' during mating rather than 'mounting and penetrating'. That is, in some sense, transgender mice.We don't need evolution here except in the sense that brains are complex organs that develop in environments that vary are subject to chaos and even minor variances in inital or early conditions can result in sometimes rather profound differences (including being born dead, a very poor result for evolutionary 'goals'!).Did your mother smoke when you were pregnant? Was she exposed to certain pesticides? These can be mostly harmless things to the individual in many cases, but can result in significant outcomes for the pregnancy. Likewise, a 6 year old smoker may find their growth stunted, and their sexual development impaired.Evolutionary theory is not require, or appropriate for this.The challenge to evolution is - how do we explain the evidence that suggests familial clustering? How much is shared environment and how much is shared genes, and why are those genes still propagating in those cases genes have an influence? These are open questions that are part of continuing research. For obvious reasons (ie ethics) we can't perform experiments to be sure so we have to opportunistically rely on data that we can grab from 'the wild'. This means it is a slow and unsure process.Is this a problem? There are lots of genetic disorders than run in families that have a bigger impact on fecundity than homosexuality. Some of these are not yet entirely explained. That's why research hasn't, you know, stopped. I'm confused as to your point, here.

Observing facts such as 'humans will continue to have babies' is different than presuming we SHOULD carry on having children. One is a prediction based on the evidence, the other is a value judgement and is not.You should not confuse 'is' with 'ought'. There are 7 billion humans, and many of them can write. I wouldn't be surprised if someone wrote that. But on the one hand it makes sense - we can better tackle disease, disability and mental illness with a better understanding of how and why the human body is doing what it is doing. On the other, this is quite different from saying 'we must propagate ourselves based on evolutionary principles'. Humans are allowed to endorse the continuation of their species if they want, but what does this have to do with evolution? Unless you can tie the two ideas together I don't think there's much else to say is there? That's nice, but so what? Obviously. If you have some specific example of someone trying to do it maybe we can talk about it. Well yes, science is performed by scientists who are humans who are emotional beings with values. This is, of course, nothing to do with evolution. Well you won't find many people that think this. Well we are apes, you shouldn't expect too much. You are guilty of this too. But this has little to do with evolution or the theory thereof, right? I mean other than the sense that we are evolved primates and not gods.

Which explains much of the facts of evolution, but probably not all of it. Not entirely, at least not by anybody credible. None whatsoever. Well, we can use the theory to design unusual solutions, but it's generally an inefficient method. The fact of evolution certainly does, the theory does not. The fact of the theory does, but the theory itself does not. Yes. Perhaps now would be the time to crack out some specific examples rather than vague generalities? Replicating entities with heritable traits, with differential reproductive states will undergo some kind of adaptation towards towards improving reproductive success relative to the previous generation and this doesn't just apply to biology. Ideas, culture, computer programs, biological entities can all evolve through natural selection given the appropriate conditions - and perhaps more. Entities that don't replicate, pass on traits or experience differential reproductive success. There is a big difference between explaining diseases in terms of germs vs malodorous vapours, or gravity in terms of hungry angels vs curvature of spacetime. Nobody can make it do that. If anybody claims it, they'll generally be criticised by evolutionary biologists. Well of course it doesn't. That's why so much effort is taken to try to avoid them, but they'll never go away.

It doesn't have to (many organisms exhibit no altruistic tendencies, for example) but it can and we can explain how using the theory of evolution and game theory and a perhaps a few other bits and bobs. Piano playing didn't evolve through biological evolution anymore than speaking English did. It is like that. But those biological traits evolved, that much is certain. Yes it was. Yes, that happened. But the idea that we SHOULD sterilize the mentally ill is not in evolutionary theory. That's some crazy idea some apes have had about how we ought to organize society. It's a political/sociological concept that doesn't rely on evolutionary theory. You can (and people did) get to it without using evolution. Apes try and prop up their crazy idea with whatever other ideas people around them find credible, science, religion, philosophy....Eugenics is just applying ancient breeding techniques to humans - it is purely artificial selection - practiced for tens of thousands of years - where Darwin's theory was principally about how natural selection might explain the origin of modern species.The only intersection was the establishment of humans as being animals and not strangely supernatural beings of some kind, but even that idea goes back to at least the ancient Greeks, so.... Well, yes. If you want to make policy, you should be careful you aren't being a bastard. The theory of evolution is kind of irrelevant to our decisions about social policy except in so far as it might explain some parts of why apes are bothering to do it. Only by people who are bad at it. Besides, there is nothing shameful about doing things which thwart evolution - many biologists spend their lives trying to find ways of thwarting evolution. Contraception can be seen as pathological from an evolutionary perspective. Most modern theories of homosexuality are about how homosexuality might survive selection despite how it may seem like a paradox.Homosexuality is just a sexual attraction. Even in 'ideal' evolutionary conditions, 50% of the population would find men attractive. It's hardly unexpected, given 50% of men's genes are from women and their physical environments are not all that different and their social environments can vary through time and space with some overlaps... that the male brain and mind can develop in such a way as to find other men attractive.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Well that's a tautology. But evolution can partly explain why so many others agree with you! Well, obviously. But evolution isn't about being 'in service to brute survival' (just ask a eusocial insect, or a male spider) so this point seems a little irrelevant. Freud dealt with individuals. Evolution is about populations. We aren't repeatedly saying this for our health, you know. No, but it is likely that you find men attractive because your brain thinks they would.Perhaps you should go back to my post and respond to what I said?

You enjoy the conscious sensation. This means the same as you saying 'I like it'. Therefore you just said
I like chocolate because I like chocolate. That is tautologous. No. Biochemistry is the proximate cause. Evolution explains why the biochemistry is the way it is, making it the distal cause. And he's quite right, but it doesn't stand against what I said. Survivability is a factor in evolution by natural selection, but it isn't the only one and its not always the most important one. That's what it does. Which is why damaging the brain can change or remove desires and knowledge.Consider optical illusions, your brain makes inferences about what is happening (such as a static image that appears to be moving). Trees aren't brains.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

*sigh* No shit. How about you focus on the bits that are relevant to the discussion rather than following pointless rabbit holes? What is the relevance of this statement? Yes, you are so far down this rabbit hole you forgot why you entered it.The question regarding evolution is 'How can a behaviour that harms the organism in question evolve? ' And 'How can it persist in a population?' Evolution can answer this question by shifting perspective to genes. Genes can benefit from altruistic acts, even as individuals do not :- see bees who die to protect the hive. I've read the book several times. It appears you either haven't, or you failed to comprehend it.

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f animals had a tendency to behave altruistically towards individuals who physically resembled
them, they might indirectly be doing their kin a bit of good. Much would depend on details of the
species concerned.
Such a rule would, in any case, only lead to 'right' decisions in a statistical sense. If conditions
changed, for example if a species started living in much larger groups, it could lead to wrong
decisions.
Conceivably, racial prejudice could be interpreted as an irrational generalization of a kin-selected
tendency to identify with individuals physically resembling oneself, and to be nasty to individuals
different in appearance.
In a species whose members do not move around much, or whose members move around in small
groups, the chances may be good that any random individual you come across is fairly close kin to
you. In this case the rule 'Be nice to any member of the species whom you meet'
could have positive survival value, in the sense that a gene predisposing its possessors to obey the
rule might become more numerous in the gene pool. This may be why altruistic behaviour is so
frequently reported in troops of monkeys and schools of whales. Whales and dolphins drown if they
are not allowed to breathe air. Baby whales, and injured individuals who cannot swim to the surface
have been seen to be rescued and held up by companions in the school. It is not known whether
whales have ways of knowing who their close relatives are, but it is possible that it does not matter.
It may be that the overall probability that a random member of the school is a relation is so high that
the altruism is worth the cost. Incidentally, there is at least one well-authenticated story of a drowning
human swimmer being rescued by a wild dolphin. This could be regarded as a misfiring of the rule
for saving drowning members of the school. The rule's 'definition' of a member of the school who is
drowning might be something like: 'A long thing thrashing about and choking near the surface.'

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This, again, is how evolution can explain how these behaviours became fixed and universal. It explains the causes for how brains originated that perform these kinds of actions. Evolution doesn't explain the proximate causes - that's just biology. You seem fixated on the proximate causes for individual actions and evolutionary theory simply isn't the the theory that handles this. Not Dawkins, obviously:

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The behaviour of a computer can be explained in terms of interactions between semiconductor electronic gates, and the behaviour of these, in turn, is explained by physicists at yet lower levels. But, for most purposes, you would in practice be wasting your time if you tried to understand the behaviour of the whole computer at either of those levels. There are too many electronic gates and too many interconnections between them. A satisfying explanation has to be in terms of a manageably small number of interactions. This is why, if we want to understand the workings of computers, we prefer a preliminary explanation in terms of about half a dozen major subcomponents -
memory, processing mill, backing store, control unit, input-output
handler, etc. Having grasped the interactions between the half-dozen
major components, we then may wish to ask questions about the internal organization- of these major components. Only specialist engineers are likely to go down to the level of AND gates and NOR gates, and only physicists will go down further, to the level of how electrons behave in a semiconducting medium.

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For those that like '-ism' sorts of names, the aptest name for my approach to understanding how things work is probably 'hierarchical reductionism'. If you read trendy intellectual magazines, you may have noticed that 'reductionism' is one of those things, like sin, that is only mentioned by people who are against it. To call oneself a reductionist will sound, in some circles, a bit like admitting to eating babies. But, just as nobody actually eats babies, so nobody is really a reductionist in any sense worth being against.

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The nonexistent reductionist - the sort that everybody is against, but who exists only in their imaginations - tries to explain complicated things directly in terms of the smallest parts, even, in some extreme versions of the myth, as the sum of the
parts! The hierarchical reductionist, on the other hand, explains a complex entity at any particular level in the hierarchy of organization, in terms of entities only one level down the hierarchy; entities which, themselves, are likely to be complex enough to need further reducing to their own component parts; and so on.

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It goes without saying - though the mythical, baby-eating reductionist is reputed to deny this - that the kinds of explanations which are suitable at high levels in the
hierarchy are quite different from the kinds of explanations which are
suitable at lower levels. This was the point of explaining cars in terms of carburettors rather than quarks. But the hierarchical reductionist believes that carburettors are explained in terms of smaller units, which are explained in terms of smaller units, which are ultimately explained in terms of the smallest of fundamental particles.

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Reductionism, in this sense, is just another name for an honest desire to understand how things work. We began this section by asking what kind of explanation for complicated things would satisfy us. We have just considered the question
from the point of view of mechanism: how does it work? We concluded that the behaviour of a complicated thing should be explained in terms of interactions between its component parts, considered as successive layers of an orderly hierarchy. But another kind of question is how the complicated thing came into existence in the first place. This is the question that this whole book is particularly concerned with, so I won't
say much more about it here. I shall just mention that the same general principle applies as for understanding mechanism.

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A complicated thing is one whose existence we do not feel inclined to take for granted, because it is too 'improbable'. It could not have come into existence in a single act of chance. We shall explain its coming into existence as a consequence of gradual, cumulative, step-by-step transformations from simpler things, from primordial objects sufficiently simple to have come into being by chance. Just as 'big-step reductionism' cannot work as an explanation of mechanism, and must be replaced by a series of small step-by-step peelings down through the hierarchy, so we can't explain a complex thing as originating in a single step. We must again resort to a series of small steps, this time arranged sequentially in time.
In his beautifully written book, The Creation, the Oxford physical chemist Peter Atkins begins:

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I shall take your mind on a journey. It is a journey of comprehension, taking us to the edge of space, time, and understanding. On it I shall argue that there is nothing that cannot be understood, that there is nothing that cannot be explained, and that everything is extraordinarily simple ... A great deal of the universe does not need any explanation. Elephants,
for instance. Once molecules have learnt to compete and to create other molecules in their own image, elephants, and things resembling elephants, will in due course be found roaming through the countryside.

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Atkins assumes the evolution of complex things - the subject matter of this book - to be inevitable once the appropriate physical conditions have been set up. He asks what the minimum necessary physical conditions are, what is the minimum amount of design work that a very lazy Creator would have to do, in order to see to it that the universe and, later, elephants and other complex things, would one day
come into existence. The answer, from his point of view as a physical scientist, is that the Creator could be infinitely lazy.

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The fundamental original units that we need to postulate, in order to understand the coming into existence of everything, either consist of literally nothing (according to some physicists), or (according to other physicists) they are units of the utmost simplicity, far too simple to need anything so grand as deliberate Creation.

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-- The Blind WatchmakerSo ask yourself - what level of explanation do you seek and is evolutionary theory the correct theory to use? It seems you want psychological explanations for homosexuality and other behaviours, in which case you should refer to psychological theories. Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Wrong, but this isn't a thread about the philosophy of consciousness so I've ignored that point and tried to bring us back on topic. Please try to do the same. The brain does store knowledge and regulate desires, regardless. The reason we are sexually attracted to people is to motivate us to have sex because having sex is a pretty good way of reproducing genes in much the same way we feel hunger and cravings for food motivates us to survive.This explains the origin of sexual or culinary desires at a population level.That isn't to say all desires will be beneficial to the individual, and evolutionary theory does not predict this. So why do you bring it up? Strawmen often are. But evolutionary biologists don't view the world this way. Your understanding of evolutionary theory is naive but you don't think this, so you think that this application of evolutionary theory is naive. It doesn't seem hopeful you'll change your views on this matter.

No I'm not. Why would anyone need to? So? No it isn't. The brain. I disagree. Perhaps you might consider using evidence rather than assertion? Might help. This does not explain why you, or more generally homosexual and bisexual people, find people of the same sex as them attractive. Indeed it is a tautology much like 'I like chocolate because I like chocolate'. You find men attractive because you are attracted to men? Not all that explanatory is it?abe: I should clarify I'm being charitable. Taking your words as you wrote them, I can refute your 'explanation' by pointing to heterosexual men with all the same properties you describe. No I am not. I am talking about homosexuality clustering in families does not have to be a problem for evolutionary theory. Because you know, you brought it up. This can only makes sense if you think attractiveness is some kind of objective or intrinsic property exactly the opposite of what I've been saying.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.