US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5064

On September 21 2016 05:05 BallinWitStalin wrote:


This will be my last post responding to you, this is getting a bit too intimate; if I keep posting like this all of TL is going to know exactly how big my dick is, so I won't respond further after this.

a) I called you out for saying something that should be verified with evidence, but inherently cannot be ("tribalism is in our genetics", or something silly like that)

b) You did not elaborate on any connection between survival instincts and tribalism; in fact, without a strict definition of tribalism to begin with (and therefor how "survival instincts" affect it) applying the concept in any way scientifically is impossible. In fact, I have no idea how you think "survival instincts" affect what you think "tribalism" is.

c) The onus is generally on the people claiming the silly thing (i.e. "tribalism is in our genetics") to provide evidence for it. I cannot actually provide sources disproving this, either, because (as I have repeatedly said) you have not provided any kind of coherent definition/meaning for "tribalism". Additionally, I suspect it is something inherently unprovable scientifically; we aren't allowed to experiment very much on humans anymore, so most attempts to scientifically ascribe behavior to genetic origins are not possible. I mean, think about it: how would you even go about "proving" the association between putative genetics and "tribalism"? Conduct controlled experiments where you manipulate clans of genetically similar human beings for generations? Find specific genes associated with "tribalism", knock them out, and then see how those human beings behave? You can't actually disentangle "tribalism behavior" from culture and genetics unless you do these sorts of things; this is why I was saying it's a tautological argument -> it basically boils down to "humans behave this way because I think that humans behave this way". It's meaningless, except as an internal statement to an arbitrary worldview.

As an example, take your concept of "survival of the fittest" -> Putting aside the meaninglessness of the term "tribe", what I think you want to say is that human beings that associated in "tribes" (whatever this means) historically had higher fitness (reproductive output) than humans that didn't. We can just call it "trait x", to simplify things. Even assuming that it is the case that "trait x" increases relative reproductive output (which, again, would need to be proven experimentally), how do you know it's associated with genetics? Culture is "heritable" -> not in the strict genetic sense, but it's something that is passed on from generation to generation, from parents to offspring (assuming the offspring are raised in the same cultural context as the parents). It could easily be the case that cultures with "trait x" (rather than humans) have higher fitness than those without this trait. Unless you conduct rigorous experiments of the nature I described above, you actually can't disentangle this.

This is why racists/white supremacists piss me off, too. They like to argue about evolution and genetics, but they are arguing things that are largely un-provable scientifically, what with our ethical reservations about conducting large scale experimentation on human beings.



Consider yourself educated, I'm out.