# How would a benevolent, all powerful deity evolve a race of happy, peaceful humans **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 26, 2009, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-a-benevolent-all-powerful-deity-evolve-a-race-of-happy-peaceful-humans/515130 "2009-10-26T02:49:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2009, 3:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-a-benevolent-all-powerful-deity-evolve-a-race-of-happy-peaceful-humans/515130/21 "2009-10-27T03:40:22Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > How dare you use facts to contradict my supercilious assumption that people who share my political views are morally superior to those who do not. šŸ˜ƒ > [@](#): > > However, I do not think I am wrong. As a general rule of thumb which has also been born out by research, liberals do not perceive threats as strongly as conservatives whereas conservative psychology is generally based on a strong response to various threats (physical threats, the threat of death, threats to the status quo) Iā€™m not seeing that in your references in any clear way. The evidence is that there is at best 0.49 correlation between conservative beliefs and threat, IOW if you tried to predict threat perception from conservative values you would be wrong 51% of the time. No mention is made of how this data was actually obtained so it is essentially meaningless. The only other evidence presented is that authoritarians are more likely to respond to words like ā€œsnakeā€. No mention whatsoever is made of how this compares between right and left wing authoritarians. Your second link is to a Wikipedia page, which would be valueless at the best of times, but which has so many dispute tags on it that we can safely ignore it all together. So no, your claim that liberals are less fearful is not born out by the research. The fact that it also contradicts the daily life experiences of ever poster here makes it pretty much unacceptable as a debating point. > [@](#): > > The stereotypical extreme liberal is the opposite, naive and ignoring threats where they exist. How do you reconcile this with the fact that in the real world we all know that liberals are far more likely to be involved in protests and far more likely to buy into doomsayer prophecies like the population bomb? The real world evidence suggests that liberals are far less likely to ignore a threat than conservatives. > [@](#): > > They may feel sympathy with a convicted criminal and never give their victims a second thought. They may feel the cold war was totally unnecessary, that pacifism is always the best response or that terrorism is overblown. They may think anyone who watches out for suspicious behavior when walking alone in a dark neighborhood at night is racist. Or they may not. They may believe that the mass murder committed by communists is justified via ends-justify-the means. Or they believe that forcing birth control on unwilling third world women as a pre-requisite for humanitarian aid is justified because the world will soon be overpopulated and weā€™ll all die. Once again, the real world would suggest that liberals are far more fearful than conservatives, just about different things. Itā€™s a difficult point to prove, but thereā€™s certainly no evidence for your claim that they are less fearful and less likely to harm people in reaction to that fear. > [@](#): > > Juvenile characteristics are selected for when breeding domesticated animals. It is something we have been doing for eons. Yes, andā€¦?As I pointed out above, we breed juvenile characteristics into animals so they donā€™t attack _us_. Domestic animals are more aggressive to one another than their wild counterparts, and juvenile humans are far more violent than adults. Is your deity trying to create a race of peaceful humans, or a race of violent humans who donā€™t attack him? Because selecting for juvenile traits will only result in the latter. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2009, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-a-benevolent-all-powerful-deity-evolve-a-race-of-happy-peaceful-humans/515130/22 "2009-10-29T18:34:32Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > The question is: > > ā€œStarting with the current crop of humans, if aliens or a creator decided to use breeding to evolve a race of happy, content, peaceful, pacifist humans what traits would they select for, and how many generations would it takeā€ > > Like I said in the OP, foxes can either be bred into dogs who enjoy humans or snarling creatures who hate humans within a dozen generations, depending on which breeding pressures you put them under and whether you select traits that make them human friendly or unfriendly. > > I would assume it could be done in under 20 generations if you had a large enough starting pool based on the wolf example. Personally I donā€™t think happiness, contentedness, peacefulness, or pacifism are inheritable traits. That is, I think that they are learned, and are in large part reactions to the environment. So, I think you could never do it, except by perhaps evolving the humans into stupid beasts like cattle or sheep. As long as people can think, they will always be able to react to problems in their environment and become unhappy, discontented, or aggressive. (Um, just like cattle or sheep. Pehaps we can evolve people into rocks?) If you want happy, contented, peaceful, and pacifistic people, you have to raise them that way. For optimum results youā€™d best eliminate scarcity first, and possibly competition. (You may have to raise each of them in isolation to eliminate the latter.) And of course once you have such people, you canā€™t expect them to raise successive generations peacefully without your supervision, either. Kids these days being much worse than the last ones, and all that. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-a-benevolent-all-powerful-deity-evolve-a-race-of-happy-peaceful-humans/515130.md?page=1)