[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE : Capitalism and XML
Sorry, I'm not a chicken, I don't lay eggs, and I'm not interested in anyone trying to "improve" humanity with the perspective of making it "lay more eggs", whatever this translates into for human beings. I don't believe in so-called "social evolution" when the objective is only productivity. Sociobiology is blinded by its motto that any human behaviour is explained by evolution and genetics. This motto is highly dubious. I really wish you could read this book [1] by Alfred Jacquard and Axel Kahn, two geneticists, since they pretty well explain why this is clueless (well, the book is in French and out of print, so I guess it won't be easy for you to read). It really annoys me when people in white coats try to build simplistic models of human individual and group behaviour. They use statistics to try to prove things and justify the current weird state of humanity. This so-called "scientifical" approach is very impressive, and people tend to listen to them, without ever thinking that there may (must) be a big difference between the model and the reality. Once again, I'm not a chicken laying eggs ; what you can prove by experience and statistics with chicken and eggs can't be applied to human beings with a free-will (well, at least compared to chicken, I don't want to discuss about free-will now). Like one of my old statistics teacher once told us, "statistics are like bikinis, they show almost everything but hide the most important". The human brain is a marvelous engine that allows humanity to escape its animal condition and break the biological evolutionary rules. Nothing, nowhere, ever told us that we should behave like chicken laying eggs. We have brains, and we can change this. Nothing, nowhere, ever told us that it was "bad" not to behave like animals, that it was bad to refuse simplistic evolutionary doctrines and help people with physical weaknesses to live instead of letting them die, to help the people who are poor (as a result of the economical game we wrote and forced them to follow) to live better. Nothing, nowhere ever told us that social selection should be made with regards to the ability of each person to gather wealth from its environment, apart from people that have already placed themselves in a good position in the economical game. Nothing, nowhere told us that social evolution should follow the rules of a capitalist market. Some people feel confident in capitalism because "basing social evolution on economical grounds is a natural continuation of biological evolution". I don't think so, and I don't agree. Either your concern is to stick as close as possible to biological evolution, because "mother Nature made it this way, so it must be good", and in this case you should forget about social evolution, forget your brains, and live like animals. Or, you reckon that humanity has a free-will with regards to its evolution, and then you should not blindly follow evolution patterns like capitalism without seriously thinking about it. You have to ask yourself, "What if capitalism and its sociobiological justification were wrong ? What are the consequences ?". The consequences are the state of the world right now, with a small number of people who wrote the rules and are living well with it, and billions of people who suffer from it. From a satirical point of view, this is what it looks like : [2]. Regards, Nicolas [1] http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/2227139412/ [2] http://www.satirewire.com/news/march02/poor.shtml -----Message d'origine----- De : Francis Norton [mailto:francis@r...] Envoyé : jeudi 28 mars 2002 12:40 À : Matthew Gertner Cc : 'arg@u...'; xml-dev@l... Objet : Re: Capitalism and XML Matthew Gertner wrote: >There's an interesting article in the Economist this week >(http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1045223 -- like >a good reactionary I read reactionary rags) that points out that purely >selfish behavior based on this principle can lead to altruistic behavior on >the macro level. Good news for everyone, I say. > Excellent article. Anyone interested in a sociobiological explanation for altruism that goes beyond kin-selection to explain the specific circumstances where group selection *does* lead to altruism could take a look at "Unto Others" by Elliott Sobers and David Sloan Wilson, particularly the first half. The criteria are surprisingly simple - you need group selection, obviously, to reward the altruism, but you also need regular reshuffling of the groups to reduce the opportunity for selfish units to squeeze altruistic units out of the group. They illustrated this by an example where farms were able to increase egg-laying capacity by selecting groups of chickens which chared cages, rather than just the individual best layers. Turned out that selecting only individuals was selecting those that laid the greatest stress on their colleagues - err... I mean cage-mates - so didn't scale up as desired... Francis. ----------------------------------------------------------------- The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl>
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