Cannibalism itself is not different. If you wonder why people have negative attitudes towards it... well, my take on it is that people have an intuition that it might cause dependency (I am not telling whether that intuition is wrong or correct) and as such it would require killing humans, unless there are no sources of artificial human meat.
@Shunya evolutionarily speaking, our brains evolved to feel disgust, because if members of the same group eat each others, how can they find mates or survive if they are social animals? This disgust evolved along with ethics and morals, that is social contracts that prevent members of the group from eating or harming other members of the groups, since groups that do this don't survive for too long.
@Shunya of course some brains are an exception (i.e psychopaths and sociopaths...etc), since mutations make some brains be born without this disgust and with a bit of more aggressiveness unlike the majority.
@Shunya so, from this perspective : Cannibalism is different in that it would prevent early humans from finding mates and support in their social community ... Cannibalism is seen mostly in non social animals.
This film made a big splash when it came out in 1972 or 73. Here is a script. Actually the first part of the script may be of more note today than the end. script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/s/…
With humans there must eventually be a religious cover. What arises from hunger and desperation to eat our own kind (human sacrifice) must have some kind of "higher meaning".
@SmootQ Doesn't the appeal to evolutionary processes beg the question? It assumes that evolution did take place (precluding an act of divinity) and that evolutionary processes, which are morally blind, would lead us into feelings of disgust for eating other animals that look similar to us.
@rus9384 , because the disgust feeling is not conscious, the dislike of human meat is in our nature : Either we like it or dislike it, natural selection does not understand alive or dead, for it : it is just a human body.
Cannibalism is definitely different from eating e.g. plants. At one side, we have to eat something to survive, and thus it is difficult to imagine avoiding also plants. Regarding animals, tehre are vegans and vegetarians, that means that it is fine. There are many different taboos across cultures and societies, but many (all) of today societies have taboo about human flesh. If there are no shops to buy it, you have to kill someone to have human flesh, and killing soemone is a crime forbidden by laws. Conclusion : very very different.
@SmootQ Evolution is just a theory that states, basically, animals evolved from one thing to another. There is no morality within that, just the continuation of the cascade of physical and chemical processes. Evolution provides no objective moral standard by which we can judge something as good or bad, so it makes no sense to say that disgust for cannibalism evolved with the species. Regardless, my point was you are begging the question by saying this is all a product of evolution.
@rus9384 Roughly speaking, yes .. if you don't feel disgust , then there is something wrong . But don't worry, I am a sociopath since I do not understand a lot of things in social life : I do not have friends, I am a virgin, I have social phobia , I do not understand jokes and I have Asperger's Syndrome ...
@tnknepp , Then you should try and read some social Darwinism : A mother does not eat her babies because mothers who eat their babies go extinct, therefore, natural selection only favors brains that do not eat their babies, This is just an example, but social Darwinism is close to this.
@SmootQ Sociopaths usually are not sociophobes. And that's still not a definition of a psychopath or a sociopath. Most people don't understand what is happening but they need not to know in order to act.
@Mauro It is different because there are human-created conditions that made it different. And humans made it different because they are different. Does not make sense.
@SmootQ Again, begging the question. You assume darwinian evolution is true, therefore you look for reasons to justify it, then claim that it proves darwinian evolution because evolution must be true. Simple definition of begging the question.
@SmootQ Everything in social darwinism is simply begging the question. Me, as a scientist, I see no support for darwinian evolution...and neither do a lot of folks. Regardless, I am surprised you make an appeal to social darwinism. The logical conclusion of social darwinism was eugenics, and the soviet/nazi purges of various groups.
@tnknepp Darwinian evolution with some corrections seems to have good methodological power. Therefore I see no reason to assume it's wrong. The guy does not seem to prove darwinian evolution, but only explains, using it, how it affects morality. The thing is not social darwinism. It is natural selection and few biologists doubt it. You can be a good physicist and believe in creationism, but you can't study a history of the universe then.
I see many reasoning errors. At first, it has nothing to do with social darwinism which is normative while darwinian theory is descriptive. Then, you say X caused Y, which is bad, therefore X is bad. But I see no proposition saying that X necessary causes Y.
@rus9384 That's not what I intended to convey. First, SmoothQ brought social darwinism into the conversation, I was responding to that. Second, I was not arguing because social darwinism was the justification for many an atrocity in the 20th century that it is bad...I was under the impression that social darwinism had been abandoned by all but the most devote darwinists.
@rus9384 From a scientific perspective, darwinism is extremely weak for many reasons. The top two that bother me are: 1. If animals evolved via gradual, small, variations over long periods of time then we should be able to create a flip book from the fossil record. We don't see that, instead we see what appear to be quantum leaps in the fossil record with no intermediaries.
@rus9384 2. Darwinian evolution has no predictive power and there are no scientific experiments we can do to test it as a theory.
@rus9384 Finally, I see no reason why someone cannot believe in creationism and study the history of the universe. Belief in a creator in no way precludes scientific investigation.
@tnknepp Well, that's because there are too few fossils remaining. Most of them are destroyed and the more time passed, the less fossils there are. So, there are not much fossils of dinosaurs or other very old species. But quite more of various homo species, mammoths and so on.
@tnknepp It has power, as people already created many cat and dog breeds using this theory.
@tnknepp In strict sense creationism demands that the first human, and anything created before that (the creation took 6 days, if you read it literally, which results in logical errors) was created 10,000-6,000 years ago.
@tnknepp Regarding social darwinism. Well, it seems that was his fault to use this term. However, the idea proposed is not really social darwinism.
@rus9384 Sorry, but that is categorically false. This is simply taking the genetic information already present and selectively breeding something "new". You can selectively breed a wolf to a poodle, but you can never selectively breed a poodle to a wolf.
@rus9384 Sure, we can argue over literal six days or figurative six days. But I stand by my statement that belief in a creator in no way precludes scientific investigation. Personally, as I read Genesis 1, I understand creation to have taken six 24-h days. However, I see all scientific data pointing to a really old earth...so I recognize the tension between the two. My job as a scientist is to make observations, test hypothesis, and understand the universe from these results.
@rus9384 If an old earth model fits the scientific data better than young earth, then I have to go with old earth from a scientific perspective.
@tnknepp Well... you can. Just aim for wolf's appearance traits. That is, all poodles have been selected from dogs very different from poodles. Most of breeds came from 20th century.
@tnknepp That's very likely correct. But as such it makes more sense to say the Earth is old. And as a biologist, you would need to assume something rather than nothing, and something observable rather than inobservable. There are hereditary diseases. Well, at least this assumption has more methodological power than any others than become popular in the society.
I am simply interested what do you propose as an alternative to heredity.
@rus9384 Well, no, if you limit your genetic pool to only contain poodles, then you will never get back to the wolf. The genetic information has already been lost. That was my point. In other words, the poodle will never evolve into a wolf.
@tnknepp There is no such thing as genetic information to be lost. It is not like an egg that can never become unbroken once broken. You can look for bigger poodles and breed them so once you get wolf-sized poodles. Then you need to try get wolf-like fur. Again, just breed less curly wolf-sized poodles (that you already have) and get non-curly dogs. Then try for grey fur color. Facial features. But I don't understand why you would say it's impossible.
@tnknepp Biologists accept the idea that successors get some features of ancestors. Do you accept it? Maybe yes. But then it seems you don't accept the idea of mutations. Or do you?
@rus9384 Of course genetic information gets lost, that's the point of selective breeding. You breed animals to express traits that are desirable and lose the undesirable. If this were not the case then every now and then you would have a wolf (i.e. the most primitive form of dog) spontaneously born by some dog somewhere in the world. Once the gene pool has been truncated there is not going back unless you reintroduce these traits from a specimen that has not had it thoroughly "bred out".
@rus9384 Do I accept this, absolutely. I have traits of both my mother and father and there are similarities between me and my grandparents as well. However, I doubt I look much like any of my ancestors from 2000 years ago. Regarding mutations, why would I disagree with that?
Well this has been fun, I have appreciated the chat, but we have gotten severely off topic. I am happy to continue, but I will be out for the rest of the night...just an FYI.
@tnknepp Feels like a fallacy: "either a poodle can born a wolf, or it's ever impossible to breed a wolf from a poodle in many generations". Or do you think that once a wolf gave birth to a poodle? I see that you think yes, that is, your idea that changes do not occur slowly, but like jumps. You don't see a wolf giving birth to something very unsimilar from wolf except very rare cases.
But this is circular: you try to prove premises of your theory by giving me conclusions of your theory with no factual evidence.
Discussion on question by Shunya: How…
Discussion on question by Shunya: How…