I’m kinda glad this is so heavily contested, because I thought I was some kinda “science denier” for being annoyed that there was some “bEcAuSe OuR aNcEsToRs” explanation for everything.
- Altruism? "CaveBros died without bros."
- Faith? "Simple explanation of complex universe make ape happy."
- Complex reasoning? "CaveBros threw selves off cliff or poked predators otherwise."
- Love? “CaveGals selected for strong sensitive CaveBros.”
(Disclaimer: I’m being intentionally facetious and making these up in an attempt to be funny. This is likely because my ancestors wouldn’t get beaten with sticks if they made funny joke, the funnier ones got to reproduce, but the trait may have diluted over eons, you tell me.)
I respect the desire to understand us, but I also think there’s a subset of people that want to reduce the complex beauty of humanity to cold, mechanical, precictable, reproducible determinism.
They’re easily spotted when they say things like “The concept of the soul is stupid, we’re just a bunch of furless lab accident monkeys that started using tools in an uncaring universe and love is just chemicals mixing because monke needed to maek moar monke.”
I feel like this stance is prized by the types that want to mind-control the world’s humans with ads, or State coercion, or corporate culture. The same types that enthusiastically rave about one day merging all human consciousness with some giant FacebAmazOogleFliX Ai or something. The same types that have no problem leveraging technology to reduce art, poetry, storytelling, relationships, down to algorithms and claim “There’s no difference.”
It disrespects the absolute mind-blowing wonder of humanity and our understanding of it, usually to appear smart or edgy for personal gain. And I’ve personally had enough of it.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You also have to look at culture. Culture has such an enormous effect on people’s psychology and behaviour!
zea_64@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
“We studied 10 Americans and generalized the findings to all humans”
NegativeInf@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
But also culture is influenced heavily by our evolution, but also also our evolution has been shaped by our cultures, and oh god it’s all spiraling in on itself
the problem IMO is just that people try to force more detail out of studying this than can sensibly be had, basically all i’m confident in concluding from evolutionary psychology is that humans are inherently social to an absurd degree, and contrary to what a lot of people want to believe people do not suck, they just end up doing bad things due to circumstances.
Pepole are inherently good and we need to take care to dismantle the societal structures that make us be not good.