Monday, February 20, 2006

evolutionary psychology

so I did a search for evolutionary psycology on nybooks.com
steven pinker is a supporter...
I'm not a huge fan of either evolutionary psycology, steven pinker, and probably wouldn't see eye to eye with denett on everything either (I don't think they are super clear in their reasoning even if they have some interesting ideas).
I forget what context i last heard about evolutionary psychology in...
First of all you don't need evolutionary psychology to show religion is not that relevant to the world except in stopping progress.
Second I'm a fan of children's rights (I was anti-vchip etc.), and the critic mentions something about denett supporting children obeying their parents just because parents are usually right and now for evolutionary psychology reasons...
by the way, the closest things to evolutionary psychology (social sciences) that I like is "sex and reason" by richard posner,
"end of racism" by d'souza, and "please understand me II" by kiersey.
I am more getting into math again... reading a really dry book on algorythms...
What did you think of "the elegant universe"? for theoretical physics is the only thing that gets me thinking about god and death and its depressing / scary... and I feel myself becoming irrational.
I think I offended an2 on my trip to LA with my evolving ;) ideas on friendship... he even called me irrational...
I tried to hide behind godel, but he was not impressed...
I know people are scared of the extremes libertarianism allows (unrestrained research into AI and cloning for one).
The problem is that you still need a very totalitarian enforcement of certain rules of law (protection of private property and individual freedom) many of which require stopping powerful individuals from violating individual rights...
I still think this is better than other types of government where you have as a given this all power government with power over anything it wants almost which is used by majorities and special interests to take away rights and freedoms from everyone else.
Naveen
from India

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