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xssve -> RE: Hypocrisy or Obsession (2/27/2012 8:00:35 AM)
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quote:
Why are people often not willing to play by the rules? I watched a program recently on the recent work being done in criminal psychology and psy-cop-athy. What I found striking is the willingness of those who have been diagnosed with the disorder to play by the rules which may seem ironic or initially absurd. I'm talking here about the logical rules, not the rules that make us human. They behave like intelligent machines, but not people. As odd as it may seem a lack of willingness to play by the rules, as in doing what is logical, is what makes us human.
That is a cogent point, and there is a word for it in evolutionary theory, it's called acentrism (without center), as opposed to centripetalism (arranged about a center).
Few species are either/or, centripetalism is essentially a defensive response to a threat - they are either acentric-centripetal or centripetal-acentric.
organisms tend to aggregate and form groups (populations): colonies, herds, packs, tribes, etc., in common defense, and and the groups evolve centripetal defensive strategies - a herd of ungulates will tend to be arranged with the females and young towards the middle, the alpha males towards the periphery - they have a better chance of escaping a predator, and in so doing, alert the rest of the herd to the presence of that predator - but they do it largely because the center will tend to be rapidly overgrazed and the best forage is going to be towards the periphery, where the herd has not passed.
Still, a herd that does this will over time, be more successful (breed more rapidly) than a herd that routinely exposes the females and young to predators, thus opportunism becomes strategy.
In centripetal-acentric species, such as Baboons, this herd configuration will be explicitly enforced - Alpha male Baboons do not allow the the females or young to stray form the middle in search of better forage, but bite and cuff them to keep them in a relatively tight, defensible formation.
In acentric-centripetal species, the Great Apes for example, to which group we belong, the formations are looser, the centripetal defensive formation is not enforced until a threat actually appears, at which point the Alpha males will rush to distract the predator, allowing the females and young to escape.
The looser restrictions on acentric behaviors has benefits to the group in terms of innovation - creativity - which is really defined by doing something that nobody else is doing or has ever done - the very polar opposite of conformity which is simply reproducing behavior by rote, imitation, which, of course, also has it's place, as an innovation that is successful, will then be imitated, contributing to group fitness, while unsuccessful behavirors will tend to be ignored - i.e., it works almost exactly like selection on the genetic level, only in terms of abstract behavior, creativity and imitation on a more abstract, behavioral level.
And, it's why humans evolved from acentric-centripetal hominids, and not centripetal-acentric hominids, acentric-centripetalism is the more adaptive mode, and we are nothing if not highly adaptive.
But, these are the ancestors of our current political divisions, the centripetal right, including the religious right, imitative, and scornful of creativity, but acting in an organized fashion, and the Left, creative and adaptive but all over the map, from feminism to animal rights to gender bending, to alternate mind states via psychoactive chemistry or ritual practice, etc., etc., and so on.
Diversity vs. conformity - the essential difference being that humans preserve adaptations not only through behavioral imitation, but through cultural modes of communication: oral history, literature, art, music, etc. - pure abstractions that may or may not even have behavioral antecedents.
It's empirically implausible for example, that Jesus actually awoke from the dead, literally, so if we accept that as fact for the sake of argument, there is no behavioral antecedent for rising from the dead, and yet entire populations alter their behavior in conformity to this purely abstract ideal/innovation as if it were a behavioral antecedent, and even further, actively attempting to eradicate those who view this effort with a jaundiced eye in both abstract and literal terms.
It complicates things: abstraction, you see, is a Two edged sword.
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