No hardcoded program is perfect

Sunday, December 15th, 2019

Is our taste for politics so different from our taste for sugar?

Instinct is not intelligence. No hardcoded program is perfect. But in a stable adaptive environment, an instinct that fails systematically will have long since been revised by evolution.

In the tribal world, not only were political instincts like loyalty and ambition productive for us individually — they also tended to work out well collectively for the tribe.

Biologists still argue about group selection, but a dysfunctional tribe is unlikely to pass on any DNA. Massacre has always been a thing. While you’re bickering endlessly around the cave fire, the next tribe over is figuring out how to just eat you.

In modern civilization, these equations need not hold. Any of our instincts may be dangerous individually or collectively. Evolution just hasn’t had enough time yet to tune our biology.

Comments

  1. Dave says:

    White liberals like Tessa Majors, Mollie Tibbets, and Kate Steinle are not passing on their genes. After a century or two of such cultural enrichment, all surviving whites will have a patriarchal attitude toward women and a shoot-on-sight attitude toward diversity, like the North Sentinelese but with better weapons.

  2. CVLR says:

    Right on.

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