Most humans who really understand it don't feel comfortable with letting evolution continue to shape us, why should we hold lesser standards when it comes to a poorly understood processes that go into making people and entire societies change their values?
Well, obviously the right thing to do is understand those poorly-understood processes and extrapolate future paths of development, develop a system to judge their relative value (within the limits of our current understanding), and implement way to steer our future in the chosen direction. That's what human rationality is for: finding out what we would want and then how to achieve it.
That, and evolution is still shaping us, it just so happens that we are a special case of its rules that allows for an entirely different minigame to be played. Rebellion against nature from within nature and all that jazz.
the patchwork of human communities started to aggregate some improved and patched up morality or past preferences instead of just developing to fit whatever had the greatest memetic virulence or genetic fitness or economic value or whatever at that particular the time.
Don't see why you use a disjunction here: can't both things happen at the same time? Also, why think in terms of patchwork rather than in terms of continuum? You appear to be using a loaded metaphor here.
Well, obviously the right thing to do is understand those poorly-understood processes and extrapolate future paths of development, develop a system to judge their relative value (within the limits of our current understanding), and implement way to steer our future in the chosen direction. That's what human rationality is for: finding out what we would want and then how to achieve it.
I would tend to agree. But this would completely change our public discussions on morality, far more than the transition from a very religious to a secular society. It woul...
I have found this most wonderful (if fairly lengthy) article, and thought you would enjoy having it brought to your attention.
It is so good, I think we should include it among the references in the "Politics is the Mind Killer" wiki page. But, before that, I submit it to you, and ask you: is there anything in this article that would warrant its exclusion from this site? I mean, besides the fact that it is about politics, and written by a notorious Social-democrat (And is that in itself grounds for exclusion?).