Agreed that the only way to actually abolish various traditional features of the state like cops and the military is through prolonged peaceful and comfortable non-use of those functions. If you have a state with a military and a hundred years go by where the military has never been used, eventually people start wondering why we still have a military. If the only thing the local cops ever do is throw old Otis in the drunk tank every few months when he goes on a bender, eventually people start wondering why his friends can’t just handle it themselves.
When they are subject to arbitrary authority that grows out of the barrel of a gun, then it becomes very clear to people the value and use of those guns. The police them have a little gun. So when I’m on the streets, I walk around with a bigger one. Thanks, KRS-ONE.
It is true that sex ratios aren’t universally 50-50. But they are very very often 50-50, even though the genetic mechanisms that create genders vary tremendously.
Yes, placental mammals have a setup where Y sperm create male babies, and X sperm produce female babies. But that’s only in mammals. Lots of other plants and animals have vastly different methods. Selecting for sex ratios is under evolutionary control, and isn’t constrained by the brute physical mechanics that Y sperm create males and X sperm create females. Our mammalian sex determination system evolved to be this way, it didn’t have to be this way. Check out the wiki article for a quick synopsis: Sex-determination system - Wikipedia.
Anyway, the point is that for species with males and females, it turns out that no matter what the mechanism for creating males and females there is almost always a near 50-50 split between the two. And the reason is known as Fisher’s Principle, although like most such laws Fisher didn’t discover it but merely described it. Fisher's principle - Wikipedia.
It’s a simple argument. Every offspring has one male parent and one female parent. If there are 9 females and 1 male who produce 10 offspring in the next generation, each female has on average 1.11 offspring, while each male produces 10 offspring. It’s easy to see the evolutionary advantage of producing more male offspring. And if the reverse ratio is true, then producing female offspring is advantageous. Any time the sex ratios are imbalanced, producing more offspring of the minority gender is advantageous. And so the equilibrium ratio is 50-50.
All this discounts such things as parthenogenesis, hemaphrotism, haplodiploidy, asexual reproduction, and on and on.
Anyway, enough with the hijack. The upshot of it is that humans are cooperative and competitive. We compete by cooperating and we cooperate by competing. Thag and Og cooperate to kill the buffalo, and then Thag beats the crap out of Og and takes all the meat himself. Then Og and Bob get together and beat the crap out of Thag and take the meat and share it, or fight over it.
And this sort of thing is so common that I think it’s misleading to divide social behavior into either competitive or cooperative behaviors. All behaviors are sometimes one, sometimes the other, more usually both at the same time.
AHunter3, I find certain aspects of your post somewhat problematic.
I did not make any direct statement about complicated social behavior. That is a very difficult problem. It is a very advanced problem. I don’t have any beliefs that are 100% confident about such a difficult problem. I have some beliefs that are say… 90%? 85%? But I’m hesitant to talk about complex social systems because – how should I put it? – let’s say there is a strong possibility of preexisting assumptions and belief systems that can taint people’s conclusions regarding such a difficult problem.
I think you would agree with that.
And that is exactly why I find the wide variety of (seemingly?) strong comments about the relative adaptive fitness of certain social behaviors extremely troubling.
These statements come up in the very first paragraph of your post.
You make comments about intraspecies competition, interspecies competition, the “survival of the species” (which is itself an extremely problematic phrase), the relative distribution of zero-sum vs non-zero sum games, and the relative dependence of the survival of homo sapiens on certain states of the world. That is… quite a lot of stuff. Extremely complicated stuff. You jumped to the complex system (about which I am far from absolutely certain) and made a wide variety of comments. Even though you personally said that preexisting assumptions and belief systems can prejudice our conclusions about such things, you nevertheless offered a wide variety of thoughts, the likes of which could easily be tainted. And you did this without providing any evidence, without providing any logical justification for those comments, and without offering any connection of your thoughts with more basic evolutionary science (which would of course be the best logical justification).
You offered these comments without demonstrating to other posters in this thread that you are already sufficiently familiar with the more basic and settled science. This more basic and settled science was actually the topic of my own post.
In my own estimation, the conclusions that are most likely to be tainted by preexisting assumptions and belief systems are those that make the most serious claims about the most complicated situations, without taking the time to build up some more well established principles. The conclusions that are less likely to be so tainted are those that start with simple ideas, and thoroughly explore and understand those simple ideas before moving into more complicated territory. I’m not sure I saw any demonstration that you have a handle on the easiest stuff. I could be wrong about that. You’d have to help me there. Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ve seen it yet.
I’m not trying to be a dick when I say that understanding the role of basic evolutionary theory is likely to be important when talking about more complex theory, such as the evolution of altruism. If people want to make an extremely broad variety of comments about evolutionary fitness, then it might behoove them to have some familiarity with the rudiments of the science. This does not seem like a stringent requirement. I think the best way to fight about any bias from preexisting beliefs and belief systems – to which you are personally subject, just as much as anyone else – is first to be familiar with the most basic and well established science
I see you show no apparent familiarity with basic ideas from evolutionary theory like Fisher’s principle or the Evolutionarily Stable Strategy. For example, this question:
In addition to the link in my post referring to the ESS, another link was to Fisher’s principle, which is about the sex ratio. The Evolutionarily Stable Strategy is a game theoretical method, developed by evolutionary biologists, for understanding questions in biology such as why the sex ratio is roughly where it is. (Along with many, many other questions. Including some more complicated questions.) Lemur866 has also posted a link to Fisher’s principle, and also given a good explanation for how it works. In addition, I posted a link above to the previous GQ thread which has several more explanations for how it works, including one from me. I also brought up some important caveats about the types of species to which Fisher’s principles applies. (What I said above, as you can double-check: “We’re not talking about bees here.”)
This principle does not apply to literally all species with sexual reproduction. It makes certain assumptions about the type of reproduction, and the relative resource cost of male vs female offspring.
But to be clear once again: Fisher’s principle is about the sex ratio. The ESS is the game theoretical reasoning behind Fisher’s principle, as well as many other ideas in evolutionary theory.
Lemur866 has already discussed this.
If you’re comfortable with Fisher’s principle, as previously described, we can discuss the ESS more generally.
When we discuss the ESS, we can discuss other interesting evolutionary equilibria beyond Fisher’s principle, which is one of the simplest cases. After we’ve discussed other interesting evolutionary equilibria, we can start talking about the evolution of altruism. And somewhere after the time when enough basic pieces are in place, based on established and settled science, we can get into the evolution of altruism, along with intraspecies competition, interspecies competition, the “survival of the species”, the relative distribution of zero-sum vs non-zero sum games, and the relative dependence of the survival of homo sapiens on certain states of the world. Or really, some small subset of those topics, because honestly that would be quite an enormous amount of stuff to cover.
And for the record, I think the argument of “If everyone were angels, anarchism would work!” is extremely weak. Anarchism could easily work in a wide variety of worlds where people aren’t angels.
I’m not an angel. Far from. But if every other person in the world were replaced with a “perfect clone” of me, the world would function. It would be deathly dull, but it would function with no government necessary. (I’d need the clones of me who replaced doctors to know doctoring, engineers to know engineering, etc. A clueless me suddenly showing up in a nuclear power plant could be catastrophic.)
Angelic nature is not a necessary condition for anarchism. The bar is not that high.
Hey OP, this thread kind of … evolved - if you’re still interested in some basic info about black bloc/antifa opposition to trump etc, there was an informative interview with someone who’s researched the movement on the 2/9/17 episode of WYNC’s radio show “On the Media.” Episode entitled “See You In Court.”
