Posted by
glen ropella on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/A-New-Society-for-the-Study-of-Cultural-Evolution-tp7586275p7586290.html
I'm an omnivore! 8^) I not only drink tea, but pretty much everything else I find laying around.
Seriously though, I don't really believe in (pure) cultural evolution, at all. As I've repeated, ideas are illusory. It's our bodies that are important. Hence, culture reduces to the artifacts and natural structures we swim in. But there are several in the cultural evolution community who take artifacts seriously. So, the domain is interesting to me.
As for the yammering (here and elsewhere) about the activism, I can only repeat that objective truth is also illusory. Scientific objectivism is a delusion and those who would separate the rest of motivated human activity (including motivated reasoning) from "science" are deluded. We all act, whether our thoughts correlate with our actions or not. Ridiculing say, a hamster for acting like a hamster is a kind of psychopathy, though clearly many of us get our kicks that way. I'd guess that snark correlates with the narcissism index.
But re: thoughts, I can also say that _embedding_ one's thoughts as deeply in, as tightly coupled to, one's actions, does allow for agility. Taking huge, far-sighted, ideological stances and making huge sweeping plans on _anything_ is .... well, ideological (which is an insult) and goes directly against everything biology has taught us over these last 156 years. Biological systems are complexes of tightly coupled, small changes that can eventually produce dramatic differences. But action is all very local. So, I try to make my actions small, realizing that 99.99% or more of all my actions are inconsequential. If thought is causative at all, it is at this very small scale. The rest is noise.
All that is preamble to my (again repetitive) statement that diversity is good. Hence, yet another organization populated at least by scientifically oriented people is a good thing ... just like both the genetic literacy project and the union of concerned scientists are both good things. Hell, even the Discovery Institute is a good thing to some (small) extent, with their grand assertion buried in all sorts of difficult to tease out pseudoscience. This is us. This is biology.
On 06/29/2015 08:40 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Oh, I don't think that these people are manipulative, particularly. Not at all. There is at least one person on the list I am enthusiastic about. If I were to think anything bad about them (and I don't think I do), it would be that they are naive. I just think that the whole project looks like it is based on the idea that we can analyze, plan, and reform in the societal domain, and I wasn't sure whether that was your cup of tea? I believe that we can do all of those things, but I am beginning to wonder if my commitment to that idea is more a value than a belief. An example of a kind of phenomenon that makes me doubt the possibility of successful social planning is the apparent rush to tear down the confederate battle flag that seems to be surging through the south. Talk about tipping point! Could we have planned for that?
--
⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
If there's something left of my spirit
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