> Such is the hideously unfair world we live in

What's unfair? You're saying merit succeeds, that merit isn't a mixed blessing. Seems fair to me.

There is a tradition of philosophy with value.

Many famous and modern philosophers are distractions from this. The same was true in the past. Each generation, most philosophers did not carry on the important, mainstream (in hindsight) tradition.

If you can't tell which is which, to me that suggests you could learn something by studying philosophy. Once you do understand what's what, then you can read exclusively good philosophy. For example, you'd know to ignore Wittgenstein, as the future will do. But the worthlessness of some philosophers does not stop people like William Godwin or Xenophanes from having valuable things to say (and the more recent philosophers who are carrying on *their* tradition).

Leonid,

Once hunting music was created, females could select mates not just by how well they hunted directly (which they often didn't directly observe), but also by the quality of their hunting music. A man's hunting music provided extra information about his knowledge of hunting. Once females started selecting mates partially in this way, there was evolutionary selection pressure on men to start making music for the purpose of attracting a mate.

Female taste in music did not correspond to hunting music absolutely perfectly; it was just flawed rules of thumb. This left room for males to deviate from only making sounds to mimic the hunt. So males started competing with each other to make music that best attracted females, at the cost of making it less like hunting. Once males started doing this, females started selecting the males that were best at competing with the other males, rather than the males with the music that sounded most like hunting. So music became a useless display (useless for survival) used in sexual selection, like the peacock's tail. Musical development after that point didn't have anything to do with hunting, which is why the origins aren't obvious today.

How's that?

Leonid,

Humans used to live in small tribes of about 50 people, and prepared for the hunt by looking at their cave paintings of animals they would soon kill. But cave paintings are not a perfect virtual reality aid for imagining a hunt. So they also rubbed their furs in the grass to get the right *smell*, and they also *made sounds* to remind themselves of the hunt. Natural selection favored these behaviors because they helped people hunt for food better. Over time, people evolved to desire certain kinds of visual, olfactory, and auditory sensations -- this was natural selection giving people positive feedback for behaviors that made them better hunters. And that's where music (and art) came from.

Is this the kind of thing you wanted?

You seem very impressed with love, as our entire culture is. Might that be a bias?

It's hard to point to concrete ways that love helps people (cooperation, parenting, and various other things are perfectly possible without love).

It's easy to point to many known ways that love hurts people. First, there are broken hearts and divorces. Then there's external pressure on who we love or not (if you don't love me I'm going to leave you; if you love her, I'm going to leave you). And then there is the theory that my love for you gives you obligations to me. People use love as a claim on others. When people love you they start wanting things from you, like time and attention. People also use your love as a burden for you (if you really loved me, you would...).

All these bad aspects of love are commonly ignored and disregarded, rather than seen as urgent problems that ought to be, and can be, solved. If love is a great thing we ought to be able to get it to stop hurting people so much and so often. That people don't have a problem-solving attitude towards love, and instead close their eyes to its flaws, is a sign that points to people having biased views on love not rational views.

Eliezer,

Is the unstated premise of your comment that (at least a significant amount of) human psychology is genetic in origin? I agree with you that *given some preexisting psychology* there are restrictions on what memes are (feasibly) acquired. Without a premise along those lines, I don't see the relevance of what psychology can do. But any argument with that premise cannot address the question of why you attribute things to genes over memes in the first place.

Eliezer,

"Genes determined the framework which memes exist in" is not an important argument about what sorts of memes we have. I think your intended implication is that genes fundamentally have control over these issues. But genes created brains with the following characteristic: brains are universal knowledge creators. With this established, other parts of the design of brains don't really matter. Memes are a kind of knowledge and so there are no restrictions on what memes are found in humans due to genetics or some aspect of our brain's design.

BTW what is the implication of emotions being memes that would be scary? The most notable consequence I see is that people could be more optimistic about changing the emotional part of their lives, which is a happy thought.

Tim Tyler,

Genes and memes are both things on which evolution acts (replicators), but they also have important differences so it's useful to use different words. In particular, the logic of *what sort of behaviors would evolve in people* is different if you consider memes or genes. The available replication strategies are different if for genes (which require sex and parenting) and memes (which require older people to communicate to younger people).

Whether something is genetic or memetic is also highly relevant to A) *how* (by what mechanism) it might influence people's behavior B) how difficulty it is for someone to change that trait.

Eliezer,

You attribute a lot of things to genetic evolution, and nothing to memetic (cultural) evolution. What is the reasoning behind disregarding memes? Is there an argument that none of our emotions, and others things discussed, are memetic?

It's worth considering *how*

> And evolution certainly gets a chance to influence every single thought that runs through your mind!

works (if it does). Just because evolution created minds in the first place does not necessarily imply it has retained influence over everything that happens in them. For example, if a person builds a house that doesn't necessarily give him influence over the termites in the walls.