Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Missing link

Here it is again. Written by Orson Scott Card, spoken by Ender (son of Bean, now known as the Giant, in Shadows of Flight.) This is the character who appears to be sympathetically narrating the author's philosophy. "We're still primates, only a few genes away from the hairless chimps that began to cook their food so that women stayed by the fire to do the cooking while their monogamous mates ranged and hunted to bring home meat. And only a few genes farther from the hairy chimps that mated whenever they could, usually by force, and lived in terror of displeasing the alpha male." Why is everybody STILL searching for a genetic causality to the difference between those two life behavior sets? IT'S NOT IN THE GENES. It's in society, in the huge sets of behavior codes in mimicry and procedural memory. The sets are recorded in procedure, accessed by individuals who live in society, and evaluated within these individuals by hierarchical comparison, and occasionally, where there is balance, by the "human" ability to make a new choice based on perception of "good."

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