[FRIAM] darwin

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Marcus,  

 

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT.  You know the little rings they put on newborn’s wrists that correspond to the larger rings they put on the mothers to keep the babies from getting lost in the puppy mill?  Every night at Midnight, lets remove the wrings from the new born babies, send them to a central location, randomize them and then send them back.  AT 8 am the next morning, all the newborns are flown to their new mothers.  

 

What exactly would that change?  Well, to be sure, it would instantly break the connection between race and class.  And, one could say, finally, that in America, all persons are created equal, i.e., have an equal opportunity for financial and social advancement.  But a day later, The 99 percent are just as screwed as they ever were.  

 

Isn’t that cultural inheritance at work?  Does it matter, at al,l that Ivanka is actually Trump’s daughter? 

 

n

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, September 26, 2020 10:56 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] darwin

 

Another ambiguous figure is Werner Heisenberg.   How about stop naming things after their attributed inventor?

 

On a recent United Shades of America, Kamau Bell interviewed Yvette Carnell, representing the American Descendants of Slavery.    They apparently believe that only native black American’s should have reparations.   This to me seems a preposterous way to rebalance the scales.   If anything the country should take steps to erase family history by, say, officially clearing parents for raising children and then mandating adoption.   The human equivalent of go to the dog shelter, not a puppy factory.

That would get a the root of the problem, the belief that cultural inheritance (if there is any meaning, which I very much doubt) is in any way coupled to biology.

 

As for presentism, this relates to the science/religion discussion in a sense.   Does a non-believer also consider the possibility that there is nothing deep to learn, and that progress is impossible?  Why even imagine there could be structure to the universe, and if not, then the things people do are arbitrary and slavery is just one of many aggregate behaviors that societies may perform.   As a non-believer, I would respond that compression of information is also something that humans do, and that in many cases it has been very useful to humans.   This discovery of compressibility can be an accident.  It doesn’t require the leap of faith that anything is designed or True in the world, it just requires tools to work in some context.

 

As time passes, there will be more opportunity for compression into models.   Some of that compression may be lossy or overtrained to context.  When that happens, those models should be forgotten.   Contemporary models may be overtrained to contemporary context.   If we take an extreme case and say there are no models that endure across generations, then history is unimportant and can teach us nothing.   If we are alienated from our past and even many in our present, then focus completely on the present context, because it will be gone in instant.   The old models are for historians and dusty shelves.

I have to admit then when I have felt alienated from my present, I have tended to put my head down and work.    It kind of works.

 

Marcus

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, September 26, 2020 8:15 AM
To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> 
Subject: [FRIAM] darwin

 

The "woke" "presentists" are coming after Darwin:

 

"Despite his notional belief in abolition, Darwin believed whites were more evolved than “savage races,” whom they would—as an unfolding of natural selection—“exterminate and replace.” Oh, and he was a eugenicist: in The Descent of Man, he muses that it would be best to simply let the weak die."

 

davew

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200926/abac3525/attachment.html>