southernhybrid

sohy,
if you ever decide to "trade up" quote by Putney


Well, thank you babe, I'll keep that in mind. Since we're in the upper fora, we must behave for now.

dangin

OK, I've been sitting on a reply to this for over 24 hours. Hopefully that is sufficient time for me to have relaxed and not tear you a new one for wasting everyone's time because you don't even have the simplest understanding of the brain.

When you see a red car, are you seeing a red car?

No, you are seeing light reflected from a car that has been covered in paint so that red is the color of the light that is reflected from it. That light travels into your eyes, through your lens and onto your retina were the light is translated into CHEMICAL AND ELECTRICAL impulses that travel your optic nerve to your visual cortex. There further CHEMICAL AND ELECTRICAL processes interpret that data so that you understand that the light you are absorbing is a field of view that contains a car which is red. (at least within the spectra that we see)

When you hear something, a series of sound waves travel up your ear canal and cause small hairs and your tympanic membrane to vibrate which causes CHEMICAL AND ELECTRICAL signals to go to your brain which are interpreted there as more chemical and electrical signals and your say, "oh, what a pretty concerto."

When you do math, the part of your brain that calculates mathmatics for you, uses chemical and electrical processes to solve problems and equations.

When you smell it is chemical and electrical (C&E), when you taste it is (C&E), when you go to sleep it is (C&E), when you wake up it is (C&E), when you pray it is (C&E), when you get angry it is (C&E), when you sit there, smuggly, thinking (incorrectly) you have made a point it is (C&E).

If you learn anything today, try to grasp that your brain, your consciousness, your soul, your awareness is a chemical process. Try to wrap your brain around that, for me, please, with sugar on top.

You said this because I disagreed with you that we are the most evolutionarily successful creatures on earth. You just don't get it do you? If the goal is sustained viability (which is the goal of life) then you have stated something indiotic, not completely obvious. We are amazing creatures, and we use technology more than any other creature. This is not the same thing as evolutionary success. In fact there is no such thing as evolutionary success. There is the ongoing battle of evolution. What are AIDS, and antibiotic resistent germs, and other viruses and parasites but attempts by the natural system to put us back in check? We are not sitting on top of the evolutionary ladder, untouchable and ascendant for all time, we have challenges ahead that we haven't even imagined yet. Before you go and call something COMPLETELY OBVIOUS again, I recommed you take remedial science so that you can understand how ill informed you are about nearly everything. It's scary really.

OK, life on this planet has been estimated to have been around for a billion years. Give or take a few hundred million the actual exact number is not that important. Our species, or more correctly the species that was here first and evolved myriad times to become our species, has been around that long. All of our evolutionary history is important to who we are now. Evolution is not an erase and rewrite process, it is a build upon what is already here process. When homo sapiens moved up from neanderthal, or whichever group we came from, we didn't lose everything that had been them, and become something entirely new. We adapted into a more successful form of them, that eventually led to us being the only ones. This means that behavioral patterns established millions of years ago are still with us. They may be buried deep, but they are there. Which is why our history as a species is important to understand as it affects our behavior today. All those animalistic drives are still very much with us. Perhaps the most important point to be made in this whole argument.

At the end you told me I was misunderstanding your arguments. You are correct, your arguments are so lacking in scientific grounding that there is no way I could understand them. We can keep trying to bring you up to even a layman's understanding of science, but it is probably not worth it. I just suggest you get a clue about science, particularly evolution, and the processes of the brain if you really want to make an argument about sex and human nature. Right now, anyone who understands science doesn't need to see your arguments refuted. They are not even scientifically literate enough to be worthy of the time I am spending on them.

K

luvluv:

You're obviously entitled to this belief. But if you believe in Ockham's razor (which you have used in this discussion) you know that it cuts God clean out. If morality can be explained by natural processes, there is no need to posit a supernatural fountain of morality.

luvluv

philechat:

Wanna bet? The Romans were an exception to a very well-established rule regarding homosexuality.

Philosoft:

That's all I'm saying.

Salmon of Doubt:

Okay, I'd like to see you make an argument for that instead of simply asserting it. I tried to lay out a consistent, parsimonious argument for the evolutionary origin and purpose of feelings of sexual guilt that would explain why there are prohibitions or feelings of guilt around the same sex acts in diverse cultures, despite differences in climate, population, religious beliefs, etc.

I'd like to see you make a case that is more parsimonious (involving fewer independant assumptions)that guilt feelings surrounding sex acts always and everywhere have their origins in religion.

Tomcats are not humans. How many tomcats are expected to invest half a lifetime of resources into their progeny? There are good reasons for human males to NOT want to get a human female pregnant that do not apply to males of other species. Almost no male animal is expected to make as large an investment into the rearing of it's young as is the human male. It is a major sacrifice on his part. If you haven't noticed, men generally don't like to get women they aren't very serious about pregnant.

I am a human male. Trust me. If I was just looking to have sex with some woman, and I didn't want to get involved in legal proceedings and child support payments, I would avoid the visibly ovulating women.

Other animals who mate for life do so on instinct, so guilt feelings to guide their choices aren't really necessary. They are essentially without choice in the matter.

And I seriously doubt that the tomcats in your neighborhood rushe over to "try to get it pregnant." They rush over to get laid.

Well, again, this contradicts everything we know about human male sexuality. With males being easily visually stimulated, naturally promiscuous, and generally speaking not overly anxious to surrender half of his paycheck to a woman he just wanted to sleep with for one night, how likely is it that he would seek out a woman who was visibly ovulating?

And if he was involved with the woman enough to want to make sure she was pregnant (and really, how often is this the case with human male sexuality?) then the open apparent ovulation would HELP. Ask your local fertility clinic. Couples looking to get pregnant generally GET pregnant without the help of any elaborate scheme from nature. But it would not be an exaggeration to say that MOST of the people who have ever been in the world are not here as the result of two people trying to get pregnant. A good many of us are here just because our parents were horny one night and weren't thinking about the consequences. And all of us who were essentially accidents would have probably never been born if there were outward signs of female ovulation.

Yeah well other animals don't get hit with paternity suits and aren't taken to court over child support payments either. Again, it is a different ballgame with human fathers. The sexual natures of most men, combined with the financial realities of raising a human child, would lead most men to try to have sex as often as possible with women who were not ovulating. This being the case, they would avoid having sex with ovulating women if they could tell they were ovulating. This seems obvious to me.

Is the human capacity for guilt learned or innate? Has nature given us guilt feelings or are they social constructs? (By your above argument, any aspect of human psychology whatsoever that is not present in apes [who are not our ancestors by the way, even from the evolutionist's standpoint] are therfore learned. This would mean that things like romantic love and our sense of humour are learned behavoirs; but they are obviously innate aspects of human psychology. No one has to learn how to fall in love or how to laugh.)

If you admit that the actual capacity for guilt is innate, then you must agree that it is the design of nature for us to feel guilty over SOME range of actions, correct? Ones that prohibit social cohesion, probably, given that we are social animals. Correct?

Would you say then that there are things which are proper objects of guilt (murder, rape, etc.) and that there are things which are alien, or unnatural, objects of guilt; things no one should feel guilty for doing (playing sports, doing arithmetic, watching a sunrise).

If guilt is only a learned behavior, with no natural or proper objects, this would imply that we could be taught to feel guilty about anything. On the other hand, if there are natural objects for guilt, then it would follow that there are certain activities that we simply CANNOT be taught to feel guilty about. I would argue for the latter point. I don't think it is possible to convince a child that doing arithmetic, playing sports, or watching a sunrise is morally wrong. I don't think anyone could ever be made to feel truly guilty over performing these acts in the same way one feels guilty over commiting murder or rape. Some acts are strictly alien to guilty emotions, and no amount of learning can overcome that fact. So it would seem, to me at least, that guilt feelings are not entirely pliable and cannot be made to attend merely ANY act. For an act to be truly a proper object of moral guilt, it must be an act over which moral guilt has some natural place.

It therefore seems unlikely to me that guilt could have arisen surrounding the same sex acts in so many different cultures if guilt feelings DID NOT ACTUALLY APPLY to the sexual realm and to certain sexual activities. It is much more parsimonious to conclude that the feelings of guilt surrounding certain sex acts are natural to the human being. That such feelings do not apply to apes may be due to the fact that no male ape is AS INDIVIDUALLY RESPONSIBLE for providing resources for apes as is the human male.

That is far, far less parsimonious than the argument I have laid out. Therefore, no one should accept your argument as being true over mine without some extensive evidence. I'd be glad to hear it.

Well, actually, there is a reason why females find one trait or another more attractive in males of their species. They tend to find the survival tools that a male has to be attractive. Females find intelligence attractive in males BECAUSE intelligence is a survival tool. And the reason why intelligent males out-reproduce their not-so-intelligent counterparts (theoretically at least, sadly I don't generally see any evidence of this trend in my life.) is because the intelligent males SURVIVE LONGER, and are THEREFORE ABLE to reproduce. It's not, historically speaking, that the female is presented with a roomful of stupid and intellligent males and she picks the intelligent one. It is just that, historically speaking (going way back to our ancestors) the stupid males have died off while the ones that invented fire and wheels and the like are still around. So you can't seperate the reproductive advantages of intelligence from their survival advantages.

Regardless of how intelligence evolved, however, it is CLEARLY a survival tool. There isn't a single animal which would not have a greater survival value if it were intelligent. And it is an incredibly effective one, and therefore, by your argument, we should expect it to be found in other animals. We must conclude, therefore, that there is something wrong with the argument that states that "if a survival tool is natural and effective, it must be present in more than one species. "

dangin:

dangin, I understand quite a little bit. We've been having problems with our discussions because, frankly, you underestimate my intelligence and you take everything I say too literally.

There is a difference between the neurological, chemical-electric reactions guarding rational thought and the hormonal, chemical reactions involved in experiencing guilt. If one could truly "LEARN" to experience guilt, it would be equivalent to one learning to release certain chemicals and hormones into his system causing a complex PHYSIOLOGICAL REACTION (which causes, among other things, one's blood pressure to go up, one's heart rate to increase, etc). No one "learns" how to do all this. When they do something they feel guilty about, it all just happens. That is what I mean when I say that guilt feelings are hardwired into the brain. What we feel guilt over evolves with age. But the ABILITY TO FEEL GUILT is natural.

That was a fantastic speech. Still, there is very little doubt that humans are more succesful than apes. Really. Ask anybody.

....or couple of billion, Johnny Science.

If you're going to lecture me about science, it might not be the worst idea in the world to brush-up a little on it yourself.

I would agree to a certain extent, but we must keep in mind that the apes you have been trying to use as examples are not our ancestors. They are our cousins. How much we can learn from their behavior about what is NATURAL or INNATE with HOMO SAPIENS is therefore probably extraordinarily scant.

Further, there are just things natural to homo sapiens that do not apply to other species, primarily the amount of resources it takes to raise young which operate on learned rather than innate behaviors. This is why there are so many restrictions on our sexuality: there is so much more required in the raising of our children than is required in the raising of children of other species. Therefore, it seems natural that evolution (or more accurately, DESIGN) would select (design) for only the most serious and committed couples to attempt the endeavor.

I don't think any amount of studying apes is ever going to overcome this extraordinarily present and extraordinarily obvious fact.

Putney Swope

In my 50 plus years, I have NEVER seen a "visibly ovulating woman" and believe me, I HAVE tried. Exactly what would I look for to determine if a woman was "visibly ovulating"?

luvluv

Nowhere Putney, I was answering an objection made by tronvillian that because human females do not give signs of ovulation, that therefore the purpose of sex was not reproduction. My point is that essentially this strategy would backfire with human males. We would tend to try to have sex with women who were not ovulating and who were nonetheless (or perhaps, therefore) willing.

Philosoft

Yeah, but you're saying it with complete disregard to the myriad factors that determine whether such a thing would ever occur. The possibility that evolution might select for oral-sex-guilt necessarily entails that oral sex reduces reproductive fitness. In the absence of reduced reproductive fitness, there wouldn't be any negative selection pressure. Partially quoting me makes it look like I didn't acknowledge this when, in fact, I did.

luvluv

I am not talking about oral sex as foreplay. If there developed a tendency to use oral sex extensively as an alternative to sexual intecourse (specifically to avoid the resource investment of a potential pregnancy), wouldn't this reduce reproductive fitness? And couldn't some guilt feelings around oral sex as an alternative to intercourse therefore produce a selective advantage to those who had them?

philechat

luvluv:

Evidence? Do not produce them from any societies that has already been converted to Christianity. Traditional societies that condones homosexuality: Ancient Greek/Romans, Japanese Sumerai warrior caste, various forms of Polynesian "male sancturary" and "male-only" castes, ancient Chinese "Sleeve-breaking relationships".

Now give me actual "textual evidence" from traditional non-Judeo-Christian texts that specifically condemns homosexual relationships. Name the cultures that actively consider homosexuality as evil from their texts.

luvluv

It doesn't need to be textual evidence, philechate (you didn't), in fact making it textual evidence would actually help me make your overall point (that sexual taboos come from religious texts). All I would need to do is provide some kind of evidence that homosexuality was generally reviled in most cultures and at most times. I'm not going to break my back in researching something kind of obvious. I believe that general tendency is extant in the world. I know if you suggest of some of the men of ancient African and/or Muslim cultures that they sleep with other men that you'd better be willing to fight.

And homosexual taboos in the Christian religion have their origin in Judaism. So would Judaism count as a non-Christian culture which disdains homosexuality?