The Human Question

RD says that the rules of game theory are not the rules-of-thumb that animals operate according to.  The former were first known in the 20th century: the latter have been around a long, long time.

This post is still being edited... it's pretty unclear as written... hopefully editing will clarify This has to do with the problems with a utilitarian understanding of motivation when it is used in evolutionary psychology.  Utilitarians look at human actions have genuine desirability solely in terms of the expected consequences. No inherently desirable actions. But they grant that repeated action can cause one fuse (or better, confuse) the desirability of the action with that of the outcome. Hence the admiration we have for virtues such as courage. Replace "repeated action" with "repeated generations" and you have at least one explanation of the origin of virtue quoted with approval by Darwin in the Descent of Man. And you are not far from today's evolutionary psychology. The problem is, why would any animal act courageously to protect kin in the first place? The initial answer, it seems to me must be that we should be asking a related quest...

We imagine that animals do courageous things because of natural selection.  But natural selection can only select from what has been put forward by random variation.  So how does a new kind of behavior arise?  If it's via random variation, then no law-like answer can be given regarding the origin of the genotype.  But we can relate different aspects of the phenotype to each other.  That is, the new behavior has to be related to appetite and cognition.  Otherwise, animals might as well be zombie-like behavior machines.  Assuming they are not zombies, mutation must result in a new cognition regarding the desirability or (more precisely) the usefulness of the behavior. But inasuch as non human perception is like that of humans, the perceptions underlying courageous behavior and other irascible-appetite-related behavior is a complex judgment.  Amazing to imagine that a mutation would give rise to THAT! (ain't doubting it--just amazed)

What's amazing about evolution is how mutation would enable an animal not simply to behave in a new way, but to judge situations in a new way: that is to judge instinctively that something desirable or undesirable is to engaged in a certain way. When I think of how much more difficult it is to imagine the cause of alteration of judgment, I can see why Darwin gave in to the temptation to resort to the Lamarkian notion of use/disuse to explain how human cognition evolves. To treat evolution merely in behavioral terms is them like robots or near zombies rather than as judging and experiencing animals.