X-Message-Number: 33011
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2010 07:37:21 -0700
Subject: Re: Gateway president
From: Keith Henson <>

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 2:00 AM, Gerald Monroe <> wrote:

>  Thus, spending years making even more money makes sense.  And, from an
> evolutionary perspective, he is : he if makes more money, he can breed with
> more women, and his genes really will live on forever.

There was a time when men poured resources into a number of women and
their children.  That's kind of gone out of favor since the decoupling
of sex (the immediate goal) and offspring as a consequence.

> Also, if he were really going to live forever, making more money so that he
> can live in luxury longer also makes sense.  But in actuality, those years
> he keeps struggling as president are years he will not get back, during
> which he could have been lounging on the beach or whatever.  His decision
> reduces the amount of pleasurable, luxurious things he will get to enjoy
> before he dies, rather than increasing them.

That's not necessarily true.  Dr. Gregory Clark has rather strong
evidence that some people's of the world underwent selection as
intense as that that turned wild foxes into tame ones.

As a result people *like* to work, and the ones from the selected
cultures work much harder than our hunter gatherer ancestors did.  The
obvious reason that Clark found in probate records is that for at
least 20 generations (same as the tame foxes) people who became at
least modestly well off produced the vast majority of descendants.

> >From an individual perspective, our instincts are wrong.  What needs to be
> done so that our memories and thought patterns live on is very different
> from what our instincts tell us.

"Instincts," or evolved psychological traits, were optimized by
reproductive success in a world without birth control.  Genes are
immortal or potentially so, from the gene's prospective, we are
throwaways.  You are absolutely correct on this issue.

But a major problem is that we don't know exactly what "needs to be done."

I.e., success on obviously needed goals may doom us.

The reason(s) vast silence from the rest of the universe is unknown.

Keith

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