On sharing meat and other lucky things

When are we likely to share resources?  At first glance, some of us might say that we share when we have more of something than other people around us.  It’s not that simple, however.

In “Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Heuristics in the Law,” Leda Cosmides and John Tooby discuss moral heuristics and the evolution of the legal system.  It is a well-written article throughout, though I’d like to focus on one aspect of the article that I found especially interesting.  I’d like to focus on their discussion the circumstances under which people are willing to share and when they are not.

Cosmides and Tooby note that the “hunter-gatherer life is not an orgy of indiscriminate sharing, nor is all labor accomplished through collective action.”  On the other hand, the hunting of large animals often is a social activity and the meat, whether caught by a few or by a large cooperating group, is often shared throughout the social group.  These transfers of meat are “not characterized by direct reciprocation in any obvious way.” Cosmides and Tooby go so far as to suggest that the sharing of meat may be closest to that predicted by Marx’s belief that hunter-gatherers “lived in a state of primitive communism, where all labor was accomplished through collective action and sharing was governed by the decision rule,’ from each according to his ability to each according to his need.'”

The widespread sharing of meat appears to challenge the evolutionary model, which would hold that “selection …

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Haldane’s four stages of acceptance

Whether the topic is Iraq, religion, discrimination, or even the scientific theory of evolution, you can likely find a use for John B. S. Haldane's description of the four stages of acceptance of ideas:       i)    this is worthless nonsense;       ii)   this is an interesting, but perverse, point of…

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Addicted to forgiveness?

Ebonmuse has raised an intriguing point at his site, Daylight Atheism.  He suggests that unrealistic expectations promulgated by many churches throw many people into disorienting existential spirals.  Instead of acknowledging the limitations of human animals up front, many church-goers (with the encouragement of their religious leaders), conceive of their journeys through life…

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Sterilize chronically abusive parents

We like to think of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as days when young children give lots of hugs to their loving parents.  We don’t like to consider that these days are also days when thousands of innocent children are beaten by their parents, their anguished cries often not heard outside of their dysfunctional homes.  Saddest of all, these children are condemned to be beaten and screamed at by the people they trust most. 

In 1988, I was waiting for an elevator at the State office building where I worked as an Assistant Attorney General. Many social workers had their offices in the same building, and several of those social workers were also waiting for an elevator.

All of a sudden, a middle-aged man started yelling at a three-year-old boy, who started crying.  The boy weighed about 40 pounds.  The man quickly got angrier and started smacking the boy violently with the palm of his hand-maybe it was his fist.  Whump! Whump! Whump!   The little boy was now breathless and whimpering.  Like the other half-dozen people waiting for an elevator, however, I did nothing but stand there horrified.  The man cocked his arm back to strike the boy yet again when one of the social workers jumped forward and yelled at the man: “Stop hitting that child!”

With that, the man looked confused, then angry, then more confused, then meek.  The social worker further instructed him: “follow me.” The man followed the social worker, presumably to the social worker’s office.  …

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Princess Diana returns from the grave to torment me

Pleassssse, somebody.  Wake me up.  I thought we were all done with Princess Diana.  But we’re not, because this is the 10th year anniversary of her death.  In other words, it’s a terrific opportunity to dust her off and to put her back up on the pedestal so that we can envy her, admire her for her so-called accomplishments and (most of all) become entranced with her image.

While waiting at a pharmacy, I leafed through the June 2007 edition of Good Housekeeping Magazine because Princess Diana’s photo is boldly featured on the front cover.  As I picked it up, I thought “Not again . . .”  This issue of Good Housekeeping also features a hagiography (what else was ever written about Princess Diana?) The reappearance of Diana aggravated me enough that I’m now sitting down to aggravate you with this rant.

The article describes Diana as “young, luminous and full of promise.”  We are told that “she was worried about doing the right thing.”  In fact, she was “saintly and endlessly giving.” I have heard it all before, though, and I’ve never been impressed with these sorts of accolades.  After all, Diana lived a plush life of glitz.  She mingled with her favorite musicians (such as Elton John) and she made unending appearances at fancy dinner parties where she wore her fancy gowns and smiled her fancy smile.  She “passionately followed music theatre and ballet.”

That’s what this article tells me, anyway.  It also tells me that she …

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