Remarks Made Once to Howard Bloom

• Welcome to the BOL Forum on Evolutionary Psychology by John Grohol, 3/19/97
  • About Evolutionary Psychology by Behavior OnLine Editor, 12/28/96
    
    

The following were offered during a discussion on Howard's Paleopsych list_serve. It seemed relevant to "values" and evolutionary thinking; it's has also been used in a segment of the course book for "Healing the Moral Animal: Lessons from Evolution."

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Thanks for your comments ... yes, you're obsessed as all of us are, each with our special pieces of knowledge about the things we sense. All of us, too, have the problem that Kuhn cited with Normal Science. He documents clearly that old paradigms do not lose believers when discrepant information appears. Adherents cling well past the marks at which a new paradigm becomes credible.

Some of the phenomena that Kauffman describes .. stasis results if there is too much interlocking of belief, too much cross-talk between decision units (thinkers or molecules). New paradigms come from graduate students' drinking bad coffee at weird hours, from malcontents' swapping notes at 2am, from esoteric newsletters. Eventually, like one of Eshel's bacterial colonies, a new group gains sufficient coherence to become a dominant focus on its own.

I think all of us err when we expect to cajol, convince, or convert members of existing camps. We slowly lose our lives while trying to modify their beliefs and will sometimes compromise our achievement in the interest of "communication." We are also mistaken if we accept established schools as the priesthood and assume the position of wooing them. The more their reluctance, the higher our bid, and vice versa.

Instead, find your own coherence; others will join ... some from boredom, some because they're not committed by training, reputation, or alliances into existing frameworks, some to make a few bucks.

My son is grown, my bills are paid, I work for myself, I am privileged to be more free than most. Yet I am directed by the same genes that sent my grandfather next door to help a typhoid victim, to die and leave his own 5 children ultimately homeless. I have done and will do great things, not merely to do great things (and not to waste time winning converts), but for a personal contentment that I've spent my remaining time in the best way possible, for my fellows, and for "whatever gods may be."

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