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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 25 Aug 2013

Taken: 10 Feb 2009

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Philosophy of Social Science •
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Alex Roserberg •

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Darwin

Darwin
darwin-online.org.uk/contents.html


www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/11/darwin-day
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . . Since it is evident that people just are not fitness maximizers, most social scientists concluded that when natural selection finally got around to producing Homo sapiens, it made a species smart enough to slip of the leash of the genes and transcend Darwinian constraints on evolution. Accordingly, these social scientists considered it safe to disregard Darwinian theory in the projects of the social and behavioral sciences. The trouble with this conclusion is that Darwin’s theory offers the only scientifically acceptable explanation of how anything can have a function. Rejecting Darwinism about human affairs requires either giving up functional analysis or devising an alternative theory of how human institutions, et cetera, came to have them.

Darwin argued that the three-step process of natural selection [Natural selection is a simple mechanism that causes populations of living things to change over time. In fact, it is so simple that it can be broken down into five basic steps, abbreviated here as VISTA: Variation, Inheritance, Selection, Time and Adaptation.] operating on generations of individuals and their traits, also operate on lineages of groups of people. Groups have traits -- norms, institutions, practices, cultures -- which are transmitted from generation to generation, and so are heritable. And these traits differ in their fitness -- that is, in differing environments some are adaptations and other are maladaptations -- for the groups that bear them. Different fitness of inherited traits is all one needs for natural selection. Groups with cooperative members will be selected for. Why? When these groups competed with mega fauna and with one another territory or prey, the winning group would have to be the ones whose members worked together, cooperated with one another to fight off predators, kill prey, and eventually kill off other groups of people. //Individuals altruists may be selected against -- heroes who throw themselves on grenades leave no offspring. But groups without people ready to sacrifice their interests for one another at least some of the time will lose out in the struggle for group survival. In the long run of competition between groups, those groups composed of people nice to one another would have been selected for. After long enough the only groups left would be those composed of the people nice to each other. Whence, according to Darwin, cooperation, indeed altruism must triumpyh as fitness enhancing for groups, despite its immediate fitness costs for theindividual members of groups. ` Page 210/211
3 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
3 years ago.