Ultimately, is civilization maladaptive?

[greenslime1951]

@Disposable Hero

I don’t know what the accepted rules are on these things but I’ve been carefully avoiding spoilers for that movie and you’ve just given a major plot point away.

It’s been out for a while. I would have imagined that anyone who wanted to see it would have seen it by now.

In any event, that theme becomes pretty obvious very early in the movie (if only stated explicitly near the end) and knowing it shouldn’t affect your enjoyment of the movie in the slightest. You can see pretty much everything that happens in the movie coming from a mile away. The enjoyment is in the philosophical issues the movie raises, the settings, and the excellent acting.

[greenslime1951]

@zoid

Oh for the love of Pete - sigh yourself. :rolleyes:

You have no evidence whatsoever for the bolded part of your quote and if history is any predictor you never will present any evidence. Once again you confuse your beliefs for fact.

I have no “beliefs” about human genetics.

:rolleyes:SIGH:rolleyes:

[Inbred_Mm_domesticus]

@zoid

Just to be clear - I advocate the stance you have taken in the second example. I believe there are numerous traits that are not genetic at all but learned. Speech for example has been shown to not present in individuals without a conducive environment (feral children are the example I’m thinking of).

This is a perfect example of what John Mace meant by the statement you quoted. Take a human and chimpanzee, give them both identical environments in which to learn English. The chimpanzee will understand many words and be able to sign a few words, but in the end will be an interesting oddity, not a speaker of English. A human will learn English.

The obvious genetic component in this case is the development of the brain so that we are able to learn language. Environment determines what language we actually learn or whether we cobble together some form of communication, but we’ll always want to speak.

Also, there is no scientific evidence of “feral children”, but there is plenty of hoaxes perpetrated on the public for various reasons and reality of these hoaxes are opportunist adults and mentally handicapped children…probably with a disorder that has a known genetic cause.

[clairobscur]

@Inbred_Mm_domesticus

Also, there is no scientific evidence of “feral children”, but there is plenty of hoaxes perpetrated on the public for various reasons and reality of these hoaxes are opportunist adults and mentally handicapped children…probably with a disorder that has a known genetic cause.

Victor is a well known case abundantly documented by his caregiver.

[HoneyBadgerDC]

Something I believe in has to do with being hardwired to operate certain physical traits that we could potentaily possess thousands of years from now. Not that we ever will only that the wiring is in place just in case. Weird but realistic dreams about flying, swimming, climbing, fighting, things of this sort lead me to believe this.

[greenslime1951]

@Inbred_Mm_domesticus

The obvious genetic component in this case is the development of the brain so that we are able to learn language. Environment determines what language we actually learn or whether we cobble together some form of communication, but we’ll always want to speak.

It’s also a somewhat chicken-and-egg thing: our genetics create the brain structures that predispose certain aspects of human behavior. Behavior can be imprinted by environment or rearing (to the extent that it overrides the “default settings”), but the predispositions will always be there.

[Inbred_Mm_domesticus]

@clairobscur

Victor is a well known case abundantly documented by his caregiver.

I guess I should also include children abandoned because of their genetic developmental disorders and were later discovered by well-meaning individuals who ascribed the child’s deficits to the wrong cause. As quoted from your cite:

@Wikipedia

Regardless, today there are certain hypotheses that Shattuck applies to Victor. “One is that the Wild Boy, though born normal, developed a serious mental or psychological disturbance before his abandonment. Precocious schizophrenia, infantile psychosis, autism—a number of technical terms have been applied to his position. Several psychiatrists I have consulted favor this approach. It provides both a motivation for abandonment and an explanation for his partial recovery under Itard’s treatment.”[4]:169

or:

@Wikipedia

Professor Uta Frith has stated she believes Victor displayed the signs of autism.[14][15]

In March 2008, following the disclosure that Misha Defonseca’s best-selling book, later turned into film, Survivre Avec les Loups (Survival with Wolves) was a fake, there was a debate in the French media (newspapers, radio and television)[citation needed] concerning the numerous false cases of feral children blindly accredited: although there are numerous books on this subject, almost none of them have been based on archives, the authors using rather dubious second or third-hand, printed information. According to French surgeon Serge Aroles, who has written a general study of feral children based on archives,[16] almost all of these cases are fakes. According to Aroles,[17] Victor of Aveyron is not a genuine feral child: “Don’t forget that Truffaut’s movie is… a movie!” According to Aroles, the scars on the body of Victor were not the consequences of a wild life in the forests, but rather of physical abuse (a fact the film alludes to with at least one scar).

[Cheshire_Human]

@Wesley_Clark

Watch Steven Pinker’s TED talk about violence and civilization, he makes the opposite points…

TED talks are hardly expositive. They are essentially random, but notable, assholes, pontificating. Randomly.

To give them any more than that, requires you to make an “appeal to authority” logical error. Sorry, I ain’t going to do that. Also, they frequently step on their own dicks, when making those TED talks. Sorry, I ain’t stepping in the shit they did. Finding cat-shit on the bottom of my shoe leads me to ignore those who don’t notice that catshit. And scrape it off. I do not ask “Could it have been scraped”, I just scrape it… That’s where TED talks are. Appeals to “authority” doesn’t work. But that’s all TED does.