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To: betty boop
My theory is that morality is premised on human nature; if the nature changes, so does everything else. I keep testing the theory. So far, it has held up well. I am always prepared to entertain new evidence to further test it.

I'm glad we're in basic agreement about this! The thing is, regarding human evolution that when it comes to answering something like "what's the best kind of government?", or "what are the best principles to live by when it comes to the opposite sex?", we have a vast store of history & comparative anthropology on which to draw. And all of this information concerns humans who are just like us, on an evolutionary timescale.

As far back as we can go in recorded history, we're still dealing with people who are Homo sapiens sapiens. If people who have access to this vast reach of knowledge - the broadly educated classes - still can't come to a general agreement on basic questions of morality & governance, then I don't know if knowing everything there is to know about biological evolution will fix it. (So it's gratifying to see that representative democracy & capitalism is taking over whole continents, if not the world just yet!)

Betty, I'm a software engineer. I write Windows programs, and lately I've been building a large Internet application in PHP & MySQL. Before that, COBOL on bigger machines. No matter which high-level language or operating system I work in, I tend to design, debug, and think in terms of the higher level concepts: What am I trying to accomplish? When it comes time to start debugging the code & track down errors or deficiencies, I still tend to think in terms of my high level code and how I failed on that level. Often it turns out to be a bug in that level of logic, but the most maddening bugs often turn out to be compiler errors - low level code. I often find these errors after days of agonizing over why things don't happen the way I programmed them - and why I can't even find the pattern for when they go wrong. At this point I have to go into Assembler mode, and look at the really low level code that got generated, and step thru the code on that level. When this happens I feel like a neurologist examining the squiggles on an EEG in order to figure out why the patient is having paranoid delusions!

The point is, there are appropriate levels at which to examine behavior, and appropriate tools with which to do it. Now that evolution has provided us with free will, I'm very skeptical that looking at evolution for answers to the best kind of society or moral code, etc. will provide much insight that history, economics, psychology, political science, and anthropology haven't already provided.

534 posted on 06/04/2002 11:13:55 AM PDT by jennyp
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To: jennyp
Now that evolution has provided us with free will, I'm very skeptical that looking at evolution for answers to the best kind of society or moral code, etc. will provide much insight that history, economics, psychology, political science, and anthropology haven't already provided.

Hi jennyp! Nice description. But a question -- HOW is free will a product of evolution? Would you say that self-awareness/self-reflective consciousness is also a product of evolution? If so, how do you know?

536 posted on 06/04/2002 12:17:48 PM PDT by betty boop
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