-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 06/17/2016 05:09 AM, Александр wrote:
This work is such a tremendous FRESH AIR for us... after reading-seeing & being zombified by the "social Darwinists" with their endless examples of pitiless and brutal struggle in the Nature (-> thus it "must be" between us too!).
Rereading this wonderful work (now on English)...i meet again Kropotkin's (and other researchers) great examples of mutual aid in the animal kingdom.
One of these examples is truly amazing:
Here's mine: Over the years three people have told me the same curious story about how their dog died: Old and sick, about ready to go, the dog went out and disappeared: To be found later, having dug a fairly deep hole in the ground some distance away from the house, backed into it, and died there. None of these animals was "in the habit" of digging holes and camping there. An animal that is about to die will not reproduce. That beast has already been dealt out of the game. Yet somehow, the domesticated canine has acquired a genetic program for a solitary funeral rite: A practical one, that inhibits the spread of disease and minimizes attraction of scavengers etc. to the site. How is that possible? The all-conquering Dominant Individual may or may not contribute to the survival of a community that includes his or her own offspring. But the individual whose behavior actually does contribute to the survival of that community increases the odds of his or her descendants out-competing those of other local communities. Add massively iterated trial and error and viola: Whatever neurophysical mechanism inspires a dying dog to do that unlikely ritual became a factory stock feature in the canine world. The recently popular book Sex At Dawn includes a fatal critique of "what we think we know" about those horrible killer apes whose example supposedly explains and excuses human ultra-violence. Among other examples, it turns out that foraging apes, when presented with a single super high value food source daily by anthropologists who want to study them, do begin to fight over control of that pile of fruit. The most dominant individuals "would rather let it rot" than allow others to share it: A massively iterated genetic trial and error process prepared them to defend high value food items "as if" there was only enough for one or two individuals - because that is usually true of "rare goodies" found while foraging. But meanwhile, when observed foraging in the wild, members of the same species tend to announce their finds to attract others to areas where more goodies are likely to be found, by bragging on the way cool find /they/ own. Among Homo Saps, the massive advantages of language and technology have given a free ride to individuals who get top marks in intelligence, strength and psychopathy. They organize for mutual advantage and spread their contra-survival social traits through the population like a wildfire. Thanks to abstract language, the capacity to lie gives them a powerful arsenal of behavioral manipulation techniques and they will seize on any opportunity to rationalize and glorify their violent behavior. Their cult of the "rugged individual" and deification of those who accumulate the most wealth and power at the expense of the community has yet to be bred out of the human species by massively iterated trial and error. One of these days I'm gonna create a propaganda poster modeled on the heroic art of the NSDAP, featuring our favorite Objectivist, with the inspirational slogan: "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ayn Rand." :o) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJXZCujAAoJEECU6c5XzmuqNCYH/1wubp64zk+S86M3TuCAfQXu a8asvbOL0DnoACNg5iVAzHdSpIBV3fyDBmlSd1fW9id0A9PJkL85GiLHtDfOJhM4 1s3E8gwHmm1mzLHTDQEgHrrBkGVKxJjWPxWRfTDBQOTbP/Uyd/2/E/46pwNRb8xK CqbCybW7kGtlPwlPPTO9jaHNYHh5M5Pq8vNPRhvg2hZr2iQnahKTjG7GLpsH/Uie Fj6WEfL6eFgqBMBlfNh4diONZL6xoEowLtpa1IvI54jPLWmKCWKDkwT1j2F6NxPr nA/Glw8uUhhMdio4do4Y+0B1BqZKi9fShNMXNyPPnUmp0uck/1STlpHKwVjDPQE= =Ak01 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----