Dumbledore's Unspeakable Word (going OT) and coming back

[nkafkafi]

> 
> Kneasy:
> Now you seem to class this as a species of 'love'. I disagree. It's
> > an in-built altruism, not uncommon in social animals and it is an 
> evolved
> > survival trait - help others of your kind and the species has an 
> advantage
> > over those that don't. Co-operation pays in the natural world. 
> 
> Eloise:
> You know, one of the things I find most depressing and difficult to 
> deal with in science is an increasing tendency to reduce everything 
> that it is to be human to a series of chemical reactions, or 
> conditioned evolutionary responses, or whatever. I'm not a 
scientist so 
> I can only express this crudely, but you get the drift, I hope. The 
> knowledge (or belief, I suppose I should say, really) that I cannot 
> trust my own emotional responses or perceptions is probably the 
thing 
> that robbed me of my own religious beliefs (religious experience no 
> longer being the final proof). 
> 

Neri:
Speaking as a scientist studying animal behavior and neuroscience 
(and as someone who's been an unwavering atheist since he was about 
10 yrs old) I must note that current evolution theory simply cannot 
explain Kneasy's altruistic deed as a survival trait. The theory of 
evolution *can* explain extreme altruism among kin (what is known 
as "kin selection") and it can even explain one person doing favors 
to a non-kin person that he has a good reason to believe will return 
the favor (Axelrod's "tit for tat" model). But I don't know of any 
working model in current Darwinist/Post-Darwinist theory that can 
explain a person (or any animal) risking his life to save a non-kin 
that he has never met before and is not likely to even live to return 
the favor. By all logic, any gene supporting such risky and pointless 
behavior should have disappeared from the gene pool millions of years 
ago. 

Of course, the fact that science can't explain it today does not mean 
that a way won't be found to explain it tomorrow, but I thought you 
might want to know that before you rush to blame science, evolution 
theory and survival traits.

Neri