Different in degree or kind (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, November 13, 2013, 23:48 (4028 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw; You are dodging around like a cat on a hot tin roof.-Great play by a wonderful playwright, and she wasn't dodging.-> dhw: The first cooperation occurred when single cells merged to form multicellular organisms. Experts in the field have noted the way bacteria form communities, so that is not exactly science fiction. We know that all organs and organisms consist of cellular communities that cooperate.-Agreed. What we are arguing is that we do not know whether, with the passage of time, the cells learned on their own to cooperate or were made to cooperate by an injected force or an external force. I am convinced it is one of the two latter options. What is your option, since your intelligent cells seem to arrive out of nowhere?-> dhw> As evolution has proceeded, so cooperating communities have diverged. The more complex the community, the greater the degree of cooperation necessary. ..... I will now restore the crucial lines which you unfortunately omitted from my paragraph above: if social animals (among which I am happy to include ants) hadn't "felt pain and fear, cherished and trained their offspring, shared with one another, learned from mistakes, planned for the future etc., they wouldn't have survived." -That is the most anthropomorphic rendition I've ever heard. Ants are divided into queens, workers, soldiers, etc. by instinct. We have no idea how that developed, but I don't see the queen patting a baby ant on the head and saying, "be a good little soldier". They automatically enter their roles.->dhw: I am not saying all organisms and societies feel or act in the same way, but I am saying the ground rules have been inherited. In our case, directly from our primate ancestors, in the case of the ants I presume directly from their wasp ancestors, but in all cases organisms build on what came before them, right back to the first communities. Do you really believe that humans invented even the brief list I've offered above?-Having read books on hunter-gatherers and quoted that material in my last book, evolutionary psychologists definitely describe how humans had to invent their societal rules. It was ape-eat-ape before hominin groups began to form with some degree of cooperation and a developing morality. One of the current theories about the natural formation of religions was the necessity to codify some rules for human with human conduct. Of course, theologans like to claim that without God we wouldn't be moral, but I don't accept that. We had to learn tit-for-tat, and zero-sum games the hard way.