From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Fri Nov 23 2001 - 06:27:59 MST
From: "Jacques Du Pasquier" <jacques@dtext.com>
> isn't it likely that there be an
> important genetic and cultural self-selection ? Those who stay tend to
> be more traditional and conservative, content with what they have, and
> not willing to take risks. Those who go tend to be more adventurous,
> more confident in themselves, more eager to discover new things
Not necessarily, because often "those who go" don't have any choice. For
example, English who colonized Australia were convicts expelled from England.
Also, many who came to America were "losers" who could not cope with the
situation in Europe, or (as another example, the Irish) emigrated because of
disaster in their homeland. So, it could be that the best and the brightest
are the ones with the least reason to emigrate. Christopher Columbus was brave
to cross uncharted seas, but was he more confident in himself than Galileo who
never left home?
> Is it not imaginable that, by successive such migrations, an evolution
> by self-selection happens (both genetic and cultural), such that you
> can basically calculate the "adventurous index" based on the distance
> from central Africa ?
What about the Africans who travelled great distances from central Africa as
slaves?
> Couldn't some kind of over-traditionnalism brought by this evolution
> account for some of Africa and ME difficulties ?
I see where you're going with this, but you've failed to reckon with the
negative aspects of migration, such that selection pressure may operate to
drive out the unfit (or less fit) members of a population, leaving the best
back home where they have secured good reproductive options for themselves.
> Couldn't there be
> some kind of automatic hatred for the successful and not traditional,
> some negative thinking, and avoidance of responsability (think of the
> "altruism claim") explainable by such genetic-cultural differentiation
> through absence of migration ?
Yes, and it works both ways: Those who hate the successful and non-traditional
may be the very ones to travel to distant lands to set up communes to practice
primitivism. As P. J. O'Rourke has said, "America was founded by religious
fanatics with guns." The Pilgrims were not avante garde intellectuals, after
all.
> Can't you actually correlate riches to the "adventurous" index : the
> farther you go from central Africa, the more riches you find ?
Quite the opposite: The poorest are driven to the "adventurous" task of
desperately seeking sustenance by traveling to distant lands. Of course this
"adventure" may itself constitute a selection process whereby the fittest of
the travelers are the ones who survive and reproduce, as in the Westward
migration accompanying the slogan "Go West, young man."
> Obviously Extropianism would appear as a new sort of migration
> (actually translating into geographical migration if you consider
> space) bringing a new such self-selection (whatever the further
> changes Extropians actually perform on themselves).
Extropianism can indeed represent a migration to more highly evolved systems
of organization. However, this need not be connected to geographic or spatial
migration as much as it is connected to migration toward more complex adaptive
ecology within the space already occupied.
--- --- --- --- ---
Useless hypotheses, etc.:
consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia,
analog computing, cultural relativism, GAC, Cyc, Eliza, cryonics, individual
uniqueness, ego, human values, scientific relinquishment, malevolent AI,
non-sensory experience
We move into a better future in proportion as science displaces superstition.
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