Comment About a Santos Lecture at Yale on Animal 'Morality'

  I must stipulate that I found the investigation into the morality of animals quite amusing. It seemed very silly. If evolutionary biologists are to be the interpreters of morality they might take the time to consider philosophically the nature of what morality is as a concept in-itself, rather than to assume that a reductionist explanation of morality can be discovered by observing select animal interactions. Group behavior of animal groups tends to be for group survival. Female black widows eat their male partners because it promotes species survival. Animal groups have leaders and pay attention to their lead and disregard unimportant members, Lead geese in a wing follow the leader wherever. When the group splits a new leader arises in the new group and seeks to rejoin the lost wing.

Primates are group animals conditioned biologically through evolution to behave as a group and take pain cries seriously- it may mean the presence of a predator munching them. To remove primates from their natural environment and to regard their social interactions in a zoo as moral questions is quite silly. The group behavior is such that it promotes individual and group survival. It is amazing to watch schools of fish shift their position with simultaneous entropy because some lone fish in the school detected a threat. It is not a matter of the morality of fish.

While human behavior has some historical origins that are vestigial perhaps, the differentiation of human cultures as well as species variation among homo sapiens sapiens may have made some vestigial behavioral patterns differ. Yet human beings with intelligence and increased brain size developed thought that allowed them to choose to behave differently, willfully, rather than as a tribal member acting like a basketball team that was paid only if the entire team wins the first place championship trophy. If that were the case more selfless ‘morality’ would follow. Selfish players that just shoot to score and glorify themselves hogging the ball would be sold to other teams because the team wants to win and be paid.

Animals in the jungle-monkeys and chimps, had few defenses in soft bodies without useful claws as weapons. Group behavior; warnings and sharing, let the chimp D.N.A. continue. It did not teach them the morality of organized crime, kidnapping, murder, lying and so forth. Human morality arises at a higher level of self-awareness and thought. Though human morality has a social dialectical element that changes and evolves comparably to chimps and select other primates, it also has philosophical thought and a level of intentional, designed behavior that allows actual morality to be said to exist.

I have observed a wolf pack trotting along single file in a remote Alaska bay and saw the last wolf stop and look at me. I was armed with a large stick. It looked at me for a minute then trotted on to continue with the group. The wolf was not making a moral judgment. It may have been aware that I am human and not short. He was curious about a possible food source- they were probably hunting deer hoping to surprise one on the beach and variously through game trails in the wood. I thought as I observed the wolf that as the last in line he might not be regarded highly by the pack. If he had howled my presence the leader might have ignored him and thought “never cry wolf”, continuing on.

Harm and sympathy is different from fairness and reciprocity. The observations of select group behavior as being about fairness or reciprocity, one example was that of the Wall Street crash Occupy Wall Street protesters, with a minority of exceptions, might better be described as about proximal financial interest of those cheated or that lost money during the crash and/or those in support of a rival political system, yet few to none were objectively detached and making a moral protest about fairness and reciprocity I would guess. One might test that theory by determining if many quite economically independent and prosperous citizens were among the protesters. Even the WW I veterans bonus army march was more about actual financial injury to actual people than an abstract group of moral philosophers (excluding Cornell West in the Occupy Wall Street movement) protesting unfair political activity. https://www.britannica.com/event/Bonus-Army

The black hamlet fish’s hermaphroditic reciprocity was given as an example of fairness- I spoke too soon about sing fish as moral examples. Heterosexual reproduction I suppose is entirely unfair as it seems to be the way of mammals- suspected of having dubious ideas about morality. Reproductive method and sexual differentiation arose entirely before there was a semblance of moral awareness. The determination was that which best advantaged the species. I do not see the value to a course on human morality of animal behavior, except in so far as human behavior can be compared in the more rough aspects to that of animals. Modern American promiscuity for example, among females, is surpassed by that of female chimpanzees.

Something like disadvantageous inequity aversion could have several alternative explanations. One is that the last piece offered, of a good reward, might be what is in the short term memory, so an inferior piece might not be acceptable. Consider the dog that is fed steak every day; it might turn down dollar store dog chow for breakfast when it appears. I suppose that might be the dog morality of spoiled.

I would disagree with the principle that humans except with select brain lesions don’t accept unfair distributions. They do that all the time. Consider those that take immediate payouts from lottery winnings that are a fraction of what they would get if they waited and took payments. There are numerous examples in financial matters of individuals taking money that is less immediately than if they had waited for maturity. There is also the example of Congress giving the Bush II tax cuts to the rich permanently; the people were willing to accept virtually nothing while the rich and big banks got everything including zero-interest federal loans for years and years, from which they could issue their own e-dollars to loan at a rate of what five out of thin air bucks for every zero-interest federal dollar loaned to the banks. Ordinary people get nothing of that. What a scam.

On intraspecies aggression I would disagree that only humans and chimps are perps. Fish for example, eat other fish. Sometimes there isn’t much difference in species. Birds will eat other birds. If a bird dies o the beach, other birds will eat it. Among mammals peer aggression is usually dangerous because they are roughly equally armed and pawed. Mutually assured destruction and approximate balance have often kept wars from starting, though not always.

Humans have more empirical independence than animals to act self-deterministically regarding behavior for-others. Actors for instance are entirely false, yet true at once. They may enact violence for strange motives concerning thought or lack of it.

There was a old tired haggle-toothed bear that ate a photographic naturalist named Timothy Treadwell in Alaska a couple decades ago. The bear had trouble catching salmon evidently, but the humans looked like easy prey being trusting and on the ground. It was a hunger decision; not a moral one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhi-gBIJhAU audio of the bear killing the couple

On the chimp Gompe war it seems that because chimps- humans and chimps broke of evolutionary lines 16 million years ago- have better brain size, land tools for climbing and walking, group behavior and individuation the leads them to try out their capacities against other groups. There are numerous evolutionary reasons for the male competition, and killing of surplus males with the superior winning males having multiple reproductive opportunities with females. Humans developed a lot of technology and intelligence through war and territorial aggression. They are a little more progressed than chimps though, and have gone on a bit farther in the way of self-actualization to the point of leaving the group and being just an individual thinker and actor. Unfortunately mass social behavior and the mass social dialectic of humans in some cases has surpassed individual self-determination and occurs for macro-social leadership reason sometimes involving economics; why did President Obama stimulate and support wars from Libya to Syria that continue to this day?

There are many challenges to individuals and species in the contemporary human social environment. Mass political behavior through democracy or dictatorship of various kind isn’t intelligent enough to design human macro-infrastructure that is perfectly synergistic with the ecosphere and individual humans such that they become the best that they can be in the empirical world.

The Demonic males hypothesis exemplifies the environmental selection relation to animal behavior. It is not about morality at an advanced stage of consciousness. Applying the demon label to males is a hate label with religious connotations. Chimpanzees have no religion. They were not called unto salvation with the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus has tried to renormalize human behavior. Aggressive godless academics reject that in preference for Wall Street wealth, war, and class racketeering forever more.

If humans were like bonobos then Neanderthal and Denisoven people might have triumphed.  

The Trouble With Democrats and Why President Trump Should Be Reelected

 President Trump’s re-election may be surprisingly easy because he need only run against Democrats. The Democrat Party these days lacks credibility and good ideas. The Democrats are a party of deceit now. Consider Barrack Obama’s record as a candidate versus his job performance.
He never said he would push for homosexual marriage. Neither did he say that he would make the Bush tax cuts permanent and assure that 99% of Democrats voted for that. If those were in his campaign message he might have lost to Sen. McCain.

During the Obama years the Democrat Party led the way in getting rid of bi-partisan cooperation even a little, by using the nuclear option to pass legislation and judicial appointments with just a one-vote majority. They demonstrated they would simply force anything they could on the public though the majority were initially against it (before the leftist broadcast media cooked public opinion polls for them).

President Obama never said he would encourage wars across then Middle East from Libya to Syria as a candidate. Instead he seemed like a peace candidate and the Nobel Committee rashly awarded him a peace prize for doing nothing.

The Democrat Party has become one of personalities and people without tech concepts for reform and change. They simply want their identity-politics membership to have power and positions without any real concepts about what the nation might need objectively to improve infrastructure or to reform capitalism. The Democrats seem to just want to make the establishment themselves and would be content with that.

Bill Clinton when President deregulated Wall Street sufficiently to let the foundation of the 2008 financial and home mortgage crisis be laid he also allowed the 9–11 people to learn how to fly in the U.S.A. President Clinton ignored common sense and took away historical parts of Russia from Russia in pressing and advantage that set the course for global destabilization and a renewal of cold war and potential nuclear conflict. That wasn’t helpful and to this day Democrats seem to hate Russia because it gave up communism for capitalism and democracy.

Democrats seem to waste public time without having their oars in the water. The Obamacare policy just forced the Nixon health care plan on everyone as well as taxes. The will to give Medicare to everyone including illegal aliens is a Democrat goal because they are daft and intellectually uncreative. There are cheaper ways to provide direct free health care to the nations poor and/or uninsurable they would not consider because they do not seek efficiency at all. They seem to have drank the Reagan supply-side economic theory to the point of willingness to add 93 trillion dollars to the 21 trillion dollar public debt.

Sure the nation and world needs to be saved from old-style economic methods of consuming the ecosphere instead of conserving and synergizing with it, yet the Democrats are clueless about that. The founder of the Gaia Theory James Lovelock (he also proved the ozone hole existed) said to quit trying to save the world because its too late already. People are like thoughtless hive ants that work together yet aren’t concerned about abstract scientific things; they just go about work and classical economics.

So I believe that people should modernize economic structure to sustainable ecological economics and look at the nation anew (Democrats are happy to have open borders so more ants can arrive to vote for them). Instead of regular rectilinear building people should build hollow mountain ranges where millions would live. The outdoors would be recovered for wildlife and wilderness and people would travel through it in Muskian hyper-tubes at 1000 m.p.h. while locally there would be minimal and necessary electric vehicle traffic. Most roads would be removed and recovered fro wilderness.

It is possible that animals in the wild and oceans by flourish could accelerate the recovery of the ecosphere. In bare rock northern island animal have transformed them into verdant places full of life, naturally. They might do the same across the nation if we allowed them to.

Industry would need to be centralized in safe special zoned mountain ranges. Science and tech would need to build, as well as the moon and Mars colonies to keep some people alive to repopulate the Earth if most of the people die from ecospheric catastrophe. One never knows if discoveries from people off-world might not develop to save the world from its own self-destruction.

President Trump is not the great ecological economic leader the nation could use today, yet neither are the Democrats. They are more spoilers that just want to get themselves in office and feel good about it. While Democrats are dissimulators, President Trump is quite honest and non-deceptive in his policies. He does what he says he will in campaigns or at least tries too.

Sure he uses self-enhancing dissimulations in the social discourse sometimes. Yet that is more about methods or ethics or in reply to accusations or dissimulations. It is not about the substance of his policies, what they are or will be. President Trump is a straight shooter rather than a soft-spoken deceiver/sophist.

Neither Republicans or Democrats are worth a damn on ecospheric realism. Neither faces up to what is needed to keep the world alive. It is more than global warming that need be fixed- far more. Neither does either party have any idea of how to reform capitalism so it serves environmental recovery. They can’t make a single practical sacrifice or reform to make tech ideas enter general use faster and non-exclusively when they might help repair the ecosphere (reduce patent exclusivity to 3 years with 10% royalties to the inventor thereafter).

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning|Paperback

https://etextworld.com/product/e...

Markets Weren't Created By Government

Markets developed naturally. The Agora of Athens near the Parthenon was a famous marketplace. Socrates said, (or was it Aristotle?) that retailers or sellers of other people’s products on tables in markets contribute the least in social allocation of resources. Trading and bartering, rendezvous for fur traders, fishermen selling product in one place ashore, the souq of the Middle East (evidence exists of those existing in 500 B.C)., even the informal markets that developed about the temple that offended Jesus at Jerusalem…those are ancient practices.

Moral Nihilism of Academic Moral Norms

It seems as if the effort to place morality within deterministic evolutionary behavior annihilates the human freedom of intentional selection of moral criteria. Humanity has evolved beyond the age of moral innocence of animals however, and might not well choose to reenter that state through the sinkhole of evolutionary responsibility.

Tit-for-Tat (Rappaport) may not work if only one winner is possible, for instance, if the loser dies. It also assumes an individual point of view that may not work in mass social behavior. That is the logic structure of a game between individuals that is believed to account for moral content (of the mass social Venn Diagram of moral behaviors) may not serve or reflect the moral praxis of the social dialectic’s interest and formation.

A more concrete example might be tit-for-tat among the rich that leads to concentration of wealth and breakdown of social well being and moral norms for a majority; the poor, yet formerly middle class.

Monte Carlo Theory- games algorithm for genetic communities fulfilling goals (of inputting as much mass-energy as possible for-oneself). Trial and error with error punished by extinction. Abstraction to consider experimental trial and error without the death penalty.

Boolean algebra/truth tables for testing reciprocal altruism

Though it is reciprocal altruism, it is nondiscriminatory regarding members… A formalized structure within the theoretical paradigm of a modern Christian support group that helps everyone in the group with their goods or services. Because everyone would give, it would be useful to quantify the goods and services to make it more serviceable- avoiding bankrupting some and benefiting others too much. There would be a community good and services credit exchange and members could get what they need. It would function as a bank. Withdrawals and contributions would be limited, though the rich could donate credits to the poor. There would be a cap on  the maximum and minimum number of credits any individual could possess though none on the quantity of input from individuals. One would receive credits for giving, though the entire system is based on Godly altruism.

Corinthians 3:19 “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.”

Conforming oneself to worldliness is counterintuitive to spiritual/moral development

Human reason surpasses the blind quantum computer maker paradigm.

Evolution and Innate Moral Traits

Education eytmologically means to lead .https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/en:educo#Latin

Humans are social animals. Heterosexual reproduction requires them to be so, and to change or evolve. Human freedom in the paradigm of the blind quantum computer designer restricts them to certain degrees of freedom and ranges of motion and behavior. It is a problem of the criterion of existence.

Social morality is an ossified praxis (Sartre) existing within a cultural continuum. Like the increase of mathematics with time, morality adds new moral constructs. Morality is what people in  a society actually do. It has nominal rather than Platonic universal characteristics, yet it is of a semi-rigid disposition. That is, some moral values continue and others change.

Human beings since the fall from non-temporal grace in the garden after they ate from the tree of knowledge and learned orchard cultivation, were condemned to a temporal universe with  energy and entropy. Human society and social morality largely evolved within that criterion sometime between 200,000 B.C. and 20,000 B.C. when they became self-aware enough to clothe themselves, invent weapons to kill their brothers etc.

The human capacity to think and invent is great. If their life spans were not fairly short they might evolve to become little gods and really get lost morally over the eons of time. In fact they might discover some way to slip beyond time into the realm of the Grand Quantum Computer Designer Spirit-Mind, or at least his outer court, in a state of total sloppiness, crudity and disorderliness wanting to take over.

There are innate behavioral human traits that are based in the biophysical field phenomenality of energy input requisites for being within the steady-state quantum field of the Universe. Human reason however has great liberty for thought. Humans that are spiritually revived are in the world yet not of it- at least those saved through the grace of God and His Son Jesus Christ.

Terms of Political Economy (Left and Right) Aren't Endearing

Socialists and about anyone can crash an economy. I think people tend to lose sight of political and economic facts in the political dialectic occasionally, the terms left and right are fairly tired and overused. They are relative to the time and people disagree about their meaning. They are not rigid designators such as the phrase ‘red apple’ that is easier for anyone to recognize (within a dozen or more varieties of ‘red apple’. National economies and trans-national corporations are things for themselves that are self-standing. Many continue to function unimpaired by local political leadership changes.

Instead of using left and right as terms representing major political differentiation, words describing the philosophy of political economy such as corporatism, socialism, reformed capitalism and free enterprise, ecological economics etc. would be more useful and accurate for the electorate. Left and right- a two-handed approach -is overly simplistic. China might use wealth anispotropic, bifurcated neo-egalitarian trans-national corporatism/communism regarding Wall Street partnership hybrids.

Creating vast bureaucratic ossifications might render ecological economic policies difficult. Bureaucracies and socialists tend toward vast left-wing crunching of free enterprise with non-creative repression. The difference between corporatism- the unification of government and corporate leadership, that was the policy of the Nazi government of Germany, is little different from that of socialism and communism, except in situational ethics. Neither is designed to reinforce egalitarian democracy through free enterprise and moderated capitalism to assure that no citizens are exploited viciously, the ecospheric health is restored and continued etc.

In modern urban society the vast concentration of citizens saturated with socialization media makes individualism and creativity challenging. One may be free to adopt the prevailing social technology and serve to develop the transistor plus line, amoral norms and social passivity as a producer and consumer, yet that vast left wing corporatist enterprise promotes in own values and through Wall Street and the shadow banking system are about as inflexible as bureaucracies regarding mass infrastructure change and egalitarian distribution of wealth as a resource that individuals may find useful for creativity and production.


Communism and corporatism are unsustainable forms of government as they repress creativity, individual initiative and promote non-creative souls to political leadership. I hadn’t realized that ecological economics is as revolutionary (or evolutionary) as it is; it is based on the principle of global resource sustainability while most political economy isn’t. In order to have sustainability and stay out of the trap of destroying the creativity and freedom of the citizens, ecological economics requires sustainable individual creativity as well. Traditional government forms eventually over-consume resources and repress individual creativity, while ecological economics cannot if it is to work

If the global economy is to transition to sustainability through national leadership societies and borders should stabilize. Mass migration harms the marginal citizen creators far more than aloof insiders in the top 50% of income earners. A transition to ecological economics discretely with well-informed political leadership (or well advised at least) should go ahead through good economies and bad since the declining health of the ecosphere requires invention, production in new forms and support for vital human interests in a better way than exists presently.

What the Green New Deal Was

The Green New Deal was a Democrat campaign trick. It’s a populist title made to bring people concerned with global warming into the far left irrational camp of contradictory policies and effects. There are other ecospheric concerns besides global warming that are equally important. They are actually too numerous to mention. Ocean acidification, mass species extinction, loss of wild habitat are just three.

It is possible to advance legislation that corrects ecospheric errors one at a time. Practical legislative action would require well educated politicians though, and they are mostly undereducated in ecospheric intelligence.

The Green New Deal could spend as much as 93 trillion dollars and let the ecosphere continue to decline. Textbooks have been written on ecological economics. Maybe A.O.C. never read one.


The changes required to continue life on Earth are substantial. Apathy and ignorance are pervasive, the countermeasures to habitat decline inadequate. Conventional building should stop. People should live inside hollow artificial mountain range constructions allowing wildlife to live freely outside. Roads should be reduced to a minority of the existing infrastructure. Hyper-loop tubes between cities should provide mass transit. Electric cars should be used on skeletal local roads. Wildlife might for itself help recover the ecosystem that has been damaged by human beings. A moon colony and Mars base should be supported so some humans might have a chance to survive mass human extirpation on Earth. The efforts to continue life on Earth are just not meeting the challenges to it.

Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications

Ecological Economics, Second Edition: Principles and Applications / Edition 2|Hardcover

The Democrat Party should get behind reforming capitalism instead of investing in socialism and corporatism. Capitalism made to serve ecospheric recovery and sustainability through Democracy’s power to set regulatory parameters to favor those that work for national vital interests, would be far more powerful. Even with little positive legislative parameters free enterprise is already making powerful advances toward solving some ecospheric problems. Free enterprise and capitalism can’t do it alone, without sufficient cooperation from government.

Carbon Engineering concludes USD$68 million private investment round and proceeds with commercialization of carbon dioxide removal technology - Carbon Engineering

Ground transport at 760 mph: New hyperloop passenger pod unveiled

LA Lakers Could Try Allen Iverson as Coach

With Luke Walton leaving the Lakers Allen Iverson is the obvious (?) choice to coach the Lebron Lakers in an interesting run to the next post season. If Lebron is the basketball Moses-figure leading the team to the promised land of a championship series, Iverson would the team's John Wooden for a year or two. Well, at least it would be a sporting game. Iverson did win an MVP award himself and might talk basketball fairly well.

                                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2REkZG-dhHc

If All the Best Chess Champs of the Past Played in a Tourney-The Winner Would Be...

People like to ask that question, as if World Champions had innate chess knowledge hard-wired like microcode in their brain central processing unit before birth and were taking an I.Q. test that required no training. Magnus Carlsen, the reigning champion of the present, would win. Paul Morphy- the best player in the world circa 1857, never saw modern openings. Players master the game of their time and invent new methods of winning, They are of their day. Gioachino Greco, Lasker, Capablanca, Karpov or Kasparov were the best in the world at their peak. Chess techniques improve over time. The peaks compile higher and deeper. Carlsen knows the old stuff and the new, the old players know just the old. Carlsen has greater vision from the summit today than players of decades or centuries ago.

Consider the example of Isaac Newton in physics. On a contemporary post-doc physics exam how would he compare to Edward Witten? Though Newton invented Calculus and the classical mechanics of gravity, he would not do well lacking relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Witten might beat Einstein on a modern cosmology exam simply because of the temporal order. Pythagoras, Euclid, Karl Friedreich Gauss and David Hilbert would not finish ahead of contemporary Fields Medalists on a math exam.

So if one were to clone the great players from D.N.A. buried underground and trained them all with chess sets and equal instructions plus videos and books who would win? There is really no way to know. Maybe Bobby Fischer would find some way to jailbreak.

The Concept of Human Moral Universals

Philosophy and psychology differ substantially in form and content. Linguistic or analytic philosophy is concerned with word, meanings, relationships and so forth. Contemporary philosophers I.M.O. tend toward nominalism instead of realism for word meanings. Words fall within linguistic ontologies, many of those can't have their meanings accurately translated into another ontology. Universals and particulars; terms familiar in logic- especially in regard to Platonism, are ideas that persist in social memory and in a realm of forms to Platonists, yet for philosophers like Saul Kripke words go so far as neo-Platonism perhaps with rigid designators retaining permanent meaning for quite a while, the realm of forms likely may not be regarded with too much belief.

If there is theoretically perfect behavior for a human being; morality and truth in-himself, just Jesus Christ ever had it. Everyone else falls short of that being temporal beings with innate drives based on consuming energy for growth. That behavior sometimes creates conflict. In nature animals eat one another for growth. Human are supposed to have had a great awakening in the Garden of Eden and learned to differentiate good from evil. They became self-conscious and thought to put on clothes. They learned to lie and dissimulate with language deceits. At some point they began to think it wrong to eat other humans, although God needed to provide rules about eating animals raw.

Humans grew and adapted behaviors and social interactive practices in differing environments and social challenges. Human morality or recurrent social behavior practices that are acceptable and workable for the given social group, adapted to the empirical challenges they experienced. Neither would all human social groups progress at the same rate. In some respects moral norms differed as much as the pace of technological growth.

The idea that Prof Bloom has that people are innately good seems a product of a privileged social class and society. Although good and evil have a subjective quality, one might want to regard some concepts such as murder as Universals.

A grandson of Nelson Rockefeller was visiting New Guinea about 1960 and reported an incident, if I recall correctly, where he was talking with two natives that wanted to sell him something. One clubbed the other to death in order to have an exclusive opportunity to make a sale. Rockefeller later disappeared there and his body was never found. He may have been one of the last westerners to fall victim to cannibalism. The practice of eating the dead persisted there until a few decades ago. It was a ritualized religious practice believed to help the spirits of the dead.

Most of humanity has had a very violent past until fairly recently (in hundreds of years). Although some rely on religious devotions to guide them toward peaceful lives, the majority didn't. Fear of swift reprisals by formal law enforcement has driven humanity into sweet public behavior. I think it a great social fallacy to believe that groups that were compelled to peacefulness because of proximal threat of harm would not evolve their own tendencies toward violence if liberated and free to enact domination.

Sin means to miss the mark. If all humanity acted according to the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ the world wouldn't have the exploitation and disegalitarianism it does. They don't obviously. Society sins farther in some areas than others, and at a different pace. Elite college moralists tend toward supporting license for anything that isn't violent. Medicine can fix it if harm follows. Evolution is treated as if it contradicted the truth of God. Eating the dead would be o.k. for the elites if they regarded humanity as tasty. Dressing that up in philosophical robes won't help. Evolution may devolve human moral norms in some social ecosystems. The notion that evolution implies inevitable moral progress hasn't validity. It may be an incorrect synthetic a priori judgement- fantasy.

 Moral behavior patterns evolve to fit the times and circumstance. Wisdom does not.