Rabbits just don’t understand how evolution works:
Many intellectual leaders of our age, including Stephen Hawking, say that the idea behind Active SETI should be avoided at all cost, but co-founder and former director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, Jill Tarter, pointed out a serious flaw in Hawking’s philosophy.
While Hawking fears that giving aliens our cosmic address could potentially bring death and ruin — much like what happened to many groups of Native Americans when Europeans invaded North America — Tarter thinks that aliens advanced enough to skip across star systems and reach Earth will be friendly, not aggressive.
“The idea of a civilization which has managed to survive far longer than we have … and the fact that that technology remains an aggressive one, to me, doesn’t make sense,” Tarter told Business Insider. “The pressure of long-term survival — of limiting population … I think requires that the evolutionary trends that ratcheted up our intelligence … continues to evolve into something that’s cooperative and take on global scale problems.”
It is survival of the fittest. A race which has been around millions of years could easily have had numerous periods when resources or space grew short, and only the fittest survived because they killed back the less fit – and did it in a workman-like fashion to further the survival of their own. Space travel, high technology, and colonization of distant lands might alleviate that somewhat, but that would mean they would be a colonizer species, not exactly the kind of guests who you want to invite to your lush, perfectly comfortable home world, if you are helpless to defend yourself.
She cites this book, which cites six reasons we are inevitably becoming a peaceful species:
1.The Pacification Process: Pinker describes this as the transition from “the anarchy of hunting, gathering, and horticultural societies … to the first agricultural civilizations… which brought “a reduction in the chronic raiding and feuding that characterized life in a state of nature…”
2.The Civilizing Process… “attributed this surprising decline [in violence] to the consolidation of a patchwork of feudal territories into large kingdoms with centralized authority and an infrastructure on commerce.”
3.The Humanitarian Revolution – “unfolded on the [shorter] scale of centuries and took off around the time of the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries.”
4.The Long Peace: This fourth “major transition,” Pinker says, “took place after the end of World War II.” During it, he says, “the great powers, and the developed states in general, have stopped waging war on one another.”
5.The New Peace… “since the end of the Cold War in 1989, organized conflicts of all kinds – civil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic governments, and terrorist attacks – have declined throughout the world.”
6.The Rights Revolutions: The postwar period has seen, Pinker argues, “a growing revulsion against aggression on smaller scales, including violence against ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals.
And just like that, magically, we became a species of peaceful, non-violent pacifists, and the changes are a permanent natural evolution that just happens to every highly-evolving species.
Nowhere does anyone consider what the agricultural revolution did to resource availability, or what Y. pestis did to strengthen the ease and wealth by removing lower-earning individuals and consolidating familial wealth, or how advancing science increases total resource availability, or the idea that humans might just be more peaceful because in most parts of the world it is nearly impossible to be denied food, housing, comfort, healthcare, and a myriad of other dopaminergic stimuli. Nobody even talks about the neurological root of it all – the amygdala.
What is really amazing is to look at all the accolades that pacifist book got for telling liberal rabbits exactly what they want to hear. People can’t stop raving about a book whose fundamental premise is ridiculous on its face to anyone who understands r/K Selection Theory.
Let us reproduce up to a level where food, ease, and housing are not guaranteed, or let the societal and/or economic structure break down and produce the same effect, and suddenly safety will not be guaranteed either. Once all of those are not guaranteed, the human machine is designed to transition to a more warrior-esque form.
As reassuring as that book was to the rabbits, is as terrifying as our present path of debt spending should be to everyone. Both our economic house and our governmental/civil structure have been turned into houses of cards on foundations of sand. We have been placed on an inevitable collision course with an economic implosion that will utterly destroy much of why the world today looks so nice.
I wonder how many awards this site will get from the rabbits for pointing that out.
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]
I am not a warrior but I am a tradesman. Given the environment that puts me in would that exercise my amygdala to be more K-like?
Or do I need a threat stimulilus for that to happen?
I use warrior in a very general sense. There are businessmen who are warriors, there are computer programmers who have the warrior psychology. Basically I think it comes down to whether a person can care. Warriors care, and when it is important enough they care enough to sacrifice. To steal an example from Bill Whittle, the momma cat, who at 12 lbs can drive a coyote off her kittens, is a warrior.
That said, anyone who hasn’t faced real danger, and worried about surviving some threat will see their brain change if they finally come face to face with that. But my belief is, if you have the initial warrior spark, your brain will rise very quickly to the challenge and adapt in the ways you need it to all on its own. It is the people who dive even deeper into denial and Stockholm Syndrome like thinking who will not see their brain adapt, and that will cost them if things turn dangerous.
Maybe you can identify warriors in your everyday life. They are the people that aren’t frightened by talking on their cell phones…?
Do you find this man’s hypothesis in making man more peaceful plausible?
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/making-europeans-kinder-gentler.html
Somewhat, but I see the increasing safety, ease, and free resource availability behind it as motivating the changes more. I’m not an expert on the history cited there, but using the writer’s cited examples, it began with the Romans tolerating violence in less amounts as the Empire went r, until the collapse, when the chaotic Barbarian leaders who came after felt that killing was OK, and even laudable. Then, as societies gradually ordered themselves, resources increased, and safety became more assured, killing gradually began to have a certain cost, then citizens demanded that killers be punished to protect the non-killers, then once that level of safety was attained, it progressed to not wanting the killers killed either.
I see amygdala that are, in their most K-form, completely tolerant of the K-selected Darwinian environment. As things turn r, they seek to have outside forces eliminate that, first for themselves personally, and then later even for the transgressors.
Anyone who says we should advertise ourselves any more than we already are, and that’s a lot from all the radio waves, is a fool of the highest order. My belief is we should lower radio emissions drastically and encrypt them so they look like noise which can be done easily if we went to all digital signals. If other civilizations near us are aggressive and can travel faster then the speed of light we’re done. We shouldn’t fear everything but caution when the cost of failure is high is reasonable.
There’s a guy who worked for NASA that says Mars has a gas signature in it’s atmosphere that looks like it was smashed by multi- hundred megaton bombs.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/odd+news/us-physicist-alien-nuclear-bomb-wiped-out-mars-civilization/article/416731
Now I don’t know if he’s correct or it’s another snow job by the psychopathic powers that be but it does give caution.
One of the things I notice from liberals is their belief that if aliens are hostile, they’ll be able to negotiate with them, under the belief they’ll reach a compromise. You can see this throughout one of the liberal visions of the future, Star Trek: The Next Generation. In that show, one of the ways the idiots look particularly enlightened is when the guard dog Mr. Worf, the Klingon security/tactical officer, offers any suggestion to use force against a problem, they either shoot it down, or let him do it and watch as it’s ineffective. Then it’s diplomacy to the rescue.
And I find that it’s really no use trying to explain to them. You can show that whenever there’s been a mass-shooting or a terrorist event, that nobody under fire stood up and started negotiating, but it does no good, because the fantasy seems to be all that matters to the liberal. He doesn’t care about reality.
Indeed, when you say something to burst their bubble about it, such as, “Why should I talk to you when killing you accomplishes all my goals?,” they think you’re some sort of idiot.
By chance I read a related comment today when discussing the predatory instincts of cats, which suggested that though cats have sharp and refined senses of smell and sight for hunting humans have lost those abilities in the 10k years since the agricultural revolution. Although I don’t think we ever had night-vision, I do wonder what changed in the enormous selective pressure that agriculture represented. The evolution of wolves to the more docile, dumber, and floppy-eared dog is pretty ominous when viewed in this light!
The aliens thing is also a huge failure of imagination – the belief that alien visitors would just simply *have* to be peaceful and friendly is just projecting themselves onto a blank canvas.
Science fiction has dealt with numerous variations on the opposite idea, not merely that aliens are belligerent and imperialistic (itself a projection of human behavior) but that they are so thoroughly different from humans that their goals and motivations are completely incomprehensible to us. Given how our own thought processes and philosophies and culture and such are so intimately bound to our specific biology and the processes of our brains (such as are described on this site), it is the height of hubris to assume that aliens will mirror the hippy-dippy peacenik Progressivism of leftist humans.
Ultimately, they aren’t talking about the aliens at all, but the superiority of their own ideology. “Because alien civilizations that come here would of necessity be more evolved and advanced than our own, we can infer from that that their society will be a Progressive’s wet-dream” is actually saying “Our Progressive utopian ideology is right, and good, and a historical inevitability, therefore ET being more advanced than us will also be more perfectly Progressively utopian than we are.” The aliens are props.
There is also the possibility that it *doesn’t* actually require a high degree of technological sophistication and civilizational Progress to attain spaceflight. I forget the name, but there is a well -known short story that uses this as it’s premise: an alien invasion fleet shows up demanding our surrender and incorporation into their galactic empire, only for it to turn out that starships aside, they are at the technological level of the Conquistadors. They merely lucked into a method of interstellar travel at a low level of scientific/technological development and hadn’t yet met any more advanced alien races.
Other obvious examples of the foolishness of “peacenik aliens” would be “Independence Day” and “Oblivion” (in which the aliens are just locusts who consume the advanced societies they encounter, and then move on, with no concern for their victims), or “Ender’s Game” (in which the aliens are so vastly different that they can’t recognize we’re sentient beings until it’s too late). And even those are concepts we can imagine – real aliens would just as likely be something we could never have imagined as angelic apotheoses of Progressive ideals.