I like R&D magazine. I get little technology blurbs from them every day. 9 times out of 10 I see some new cool nanoscale idea. Some new sensor, some new actuator. If you are a high tech junkie, beyond the latest car stereo or lego system I highly recommend the daily newsletter. Its a quick read, you mentally throw out most of it, and take in 1 or tow goodies for the day.
But alas, I found this article.
Here is an early paragraph:
In contrast to "every man for himself" interpretations of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.
When I read that, I had so many thoughts at once my brain started vibrating.
- Most often I hear about how darwinism leads to socialism. And yet here they claim that darwinism is pure free market.
- Darwin never, ever claimed “every man for himself”, it was always about populations.
- Never mind the fact that this is hardly a new understanding of evolution
However the rest of the article is an interesting read. Sadly I don’t have the resources (time mostly) to follow up on all the claims in the article. I realize tha thte first paragraph was probably just intended to light a fire for the rest of the article. But still I would have written something more like:
Contrary to the layman's interpretation of evolution, there are wide swaths of research that show that some of the success of the human race has sympathy and altruism to thank for it. But until recently, we have not understood much of the actual physiological mechanisms for it. Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists have provided some new insight into these traits.
Or something like that…
