Comment Programming The Trenchcoat Brain (Score 2) 236
Hear hear, thank you for a delightful review of a truly captivating book; I'm glad to see the academic athiests finally getting some coverage of their books, as I am terribly sick of reading all the /. reviews of books like "finding god in the web" and other such drivel.
As for the tragedy yesterday and how an understanding of it can be approached from an "evolutionary psychology" perspective, I'll take the first stab at it:
After immediate survival, the next most important goal of the human psyche is to increase social status among peers, which in turn results in increased mating opportunity. There are many tools in the "mental warchest" that humans employ to achieve this goal. Arguably, it is for these very reasons that the human brain has exploded in size over the last million years or so (see Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow): Not as a tool of survival in "the wild", but as a tool to manipulate and influence other humans.
The willingness to employ physical violence is one of the natural tools with which we are endowed; particularly among men, there is a certain thrill to the kill of another man, powerful, confidence inspiring, and impressive amongst others (usually both male and female). Witness professional sports, or Quake: A stage upon which to play out all of the symbols of violence, without the actual death. Why do we love to play out these symbols? Because jocks get laid.
And these kids didn't get laid. (Seen their pictures?). And they targeted jocks in their killing spree.
Consider what would have been the outcome of their carefully planned attacked in the "ancestral environment", in which your world consisted of 100-200 persons, all of whom you knew and would likely live your entire life with.
The jocks, who had all of the mating opportunity in your little community, would be conveniently removed from society, while at the same time the killers would wear new mantles of (fearful) respectability.
From natural selection's standpoint, what happened yesterday was a viable and intelligent career move.
From "our" standpoint, however, the evolutionist's mantra must be repeated: " "is" does not mean "ought" ", in other words, to say that we ARE a certain way (in a "natural sense") does not mean we SHOULD be that way, or that we SHOULDN'T bother to try to work against our "natural" inclinations in order to foster a more amicable society. This is why we have laws, against killing for example.
Reason clearly shows anyone who reflects upon it that the "strategy" employed yesterday, although instinctive and "natural" from an animal sense, would be pointless in modern society, in which we have arranged things such that those who commit physical violence are guaranteed to have zero future mating opportunity. And, not seeing any other solution to their "problem", they concluded that their own lives were not worth continuing, thus ending the day in suicide.
There, I hope I have done a decent job "spinning" yesterday's awful events in a style congruent with Pinker's "How the Mind Works". If anyone else (who has actually read the book, please!) can do better, I'd love to hear it.
As for the tragedy yesterday and how an understanding of it can be approached from an "evolutionary psychology" perspective, I'll take the first stab at it:
After immediate survival, the next most important goal of the human psyche is to increase social status among peers, which in turn results in increased mating opportunity. There are many tools in the "mental warchest" that humans employ to achieve this goal. Arguably, it is for these very reasons that the human brain has exploded in size over the last million years or so (see Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow): Not as a tool of survival in "the wild", but as a tool to manipulate and influence other humans.
The willingness to employ physical violence is one of the natural tools with which we are endowed; particularly among men, there is a certain thrill to the kill of another man, powerful, confidence inspiring, and impressive amongst others (usually both male and female). Witness professional sports, or Quake: A stage upon which to play out all of the symbols of violence, without the actual death. Why do we love to play out these symbols? Because jocks get laid.
And these kids didn't get laid. (Seen their pictures?). And they targeted jocks in their killing spree.
Consider what would have been the outcome of their carefully planned attacked in the "ancestral environment", in which your world consisted of 100-200 persons, all of whom you knew and would likely live your entire life with.
The jocks, who had all of the mating opportunity in your little community, would be conveniently removed from society, while at the same time the killers would wear new mantles of (fearful) respectability.
From natural selection's standpoint, what happened yesterday was a viable and intelligent career move.
From "our" standpoint, however, the evolutionist's mantra must be repeated: " "is" does not mean "ought" ", in other words, to say that we ARE a certain way (in a "natural sense") does not mean we SHOULD be that way, or that we SHOULDN'T bother to try to work against our "natural" inclinations in order to foster a more amicable society. This is why we have laws, against killing for example.
Reason clearly shows anyone who reflects upon it that the "strategy" employed yesterday, although instinctive and "natural" from an animal sense, would be pointless in modern society, in which we have arranged things such that those who commit physical violence are guaranteed to have zero future mating opportunity. And, not seeing any other solution to their "problem", they concluded that their own lives were not worth continuing, thus ending the day in suicide.
There, I hope I have done a decent job "spinning" yesterday's awful events in a style congruent with Pinker's "How the Mind Works". If anyone else (who has actually read the book, please!) can do better, I'd love to hear it.
