This is just a theory, that the peahens are intuitively calculating that a peacock with big feathers is engaging in conspicuous consumption. You can’t get inside their heads. Or maybe you can, but I think to do so you need to anthropomorphize just a little bit. Or peacockomorphize your self.

There’s three important points you raise here, so I’d like to tease them out individually.

1. What does conscious thought mean? More often than not, conscious thought is the “just-so” story we tell ourselves to explain our actions. See B.F. Skinner and the behavioralist school of psychology. So, what good does it do us to “get inside their heads” when all we’ll find there is the same misdirection we use to sooth ourselves? The fact that we can’t get inside their heads may give us a clearer picture of their true motivations than even they have, because we’re not clouded by the rationalizations they create. A quote I like very much from a fellow no longer here: “Humans are not rational creatures, we’re rationalizing creatures.”
2. You said it’s “just a theory” that peahens mate with peacocks because they find feathers attractive. These are the known facts: given the choice, most peahens tend to mate with the peacocks with the biggest, showiest feathers. So whatever they believe on the conscious level, it’s going to be a rationalization of the fact that they do find big, showy feathers attractive. We know this just from observing their behavior. So it’s not a theory—by an overwhelming margin, peahens prefer peacocks with big feathers. Now, why would that be? In general, we can say that any animal will prefer to mate with another that evinces strong genes, to pass on to its young. Not that we think in those terms, and yet everything we consider “beautiful”—everything that other cultures consider “beautiful”—is in some way a “rule of thumb” for judging an individual’s genetic fitness. Men tend to like wide hips, for instance. Wide hips aids in childbirth. We overwhelmingly prefer symmetrical features, a sign that one lacks in genetic deformities. Likewise, we see the same theme in other animals. It’s not hard to understand why. Animals that judge “beauty” or attractiveness or just plain horniness, whatever motivates them to mate, by some other criterion will produce scattershot children. Some will be very healthy, others very sickly, and most in between. However, if you ever get an animal that judges “beauty” by correlations of genetic fitness, there’s an individual who will tend to mate more often with the very genetically fit; so the children who inherit that aesthetic will be much more likely to be genetically fit than the children of the animal that has no such standard. Over time, the only ones that will be left will be the ones who judge beauty by rubrics of genetic fitness. So, this fairly simple theory makes a prediction: peahens will prefer peacocks with large feathers, because large feathers indicate strong genes. And lo and behold, they do! That’s not “just a theory,” that’s the best understanding we have of why this takes place.
3. Anthropomorphosis is a powerful tool for understanding and relating to other forms of life. Sure, we can understand other forms of life on a purely biological level, like the evolutionary theory I’ve been talking about, and that level has its uses, but there are other levels, as well. We’re all natural born animists, we all anthropomorphize easily and naturally. That’s another level of understanding, and it has its uses, too. But we should also be careful to keep them straight, not because one is “superior” to the other, or one is more “true” than the other, but because to do otherwise would be to demean them both. Humans have the innate capacity for both logical and magical thought; we’re at our best when we use them both.

But really it could just be that peahens are choosey and that they are impressed with big colorful feathers.

Why are they impressed with big colorful feathers?

You seem to be saying we (animal plant and human alike)are all dead biological machines traveling through time according to blind mechanical processes. So that means we can be animists and connect with each other.

Wow, you’ve misunderstood me utterly.

I make no division between the physical and the spiritual. I don’t believe in a uniquely “spiritual” world. The air itself is pregnant with life; the past is buried beneath us; the future lurks beyond the horizon. You can watch the living world as if it were a dead machine, and you’ll gain a superficial knowledge of its mechanics that’s useful for some things, and there are even times when that’s called for. But it’s a living world, and everything in it is alive. That’s what we’re part of, and what we experience, and if we don’t jump into that world and breathe and love and cry and die with it, well, it’s not the world that’s a dead machine, but us.

No, I’m not saying the world’s a dead machine at all. But it seems to me that in a world where spirit has not been divorced from flesh, that everything should be as understandable to the scientist as to the mystic. Saying that the forces that create the living world are natural and understandable even to the merely rational mind does not denigrate it to being a dead machine. It means that everything operates, simultaneously, on multiple levels.

I am suggesting that we all create one another by our experiences with one another, we are all shaped by each other, and it may be that the means by which we make ourselves are rarely conscious—that our conscious actions may be more often producing the illusion that we control ourselves, than the reality of it. Why would we expect total mastery of ourselves in a living world? Would we not instead expect to often be in the thrall of other “spirits,” even the spirits of our ancestors—encoded in the genetic imperative they left us, in our flesh and bones and blood?

It’s a very broad statement. Its not really getting to the meat and potatoes of what the behavior is and what genes are turning on and being acted on. Its not really saying anything. It IS a tautology. Its saying this behavior survived because it was adaptive and was passed on. It was passed on because it was adaptive and survived.

That’s not a tautology. It’s passed on because it’s adaptive. To be a tautology, you’d need to add that it’s adaptive because it’s passed on. That’s not the case: it’s adaptive because in a particular time and place, it helps.

But we know that a lot of behavior is adaptive, and we can trace the whole process from start to finish. DNA provides the chemical template for forming proteins, which make up everything in your body. Your body reacts in a particular way to the chemical reaction with sugar, which releases other chemical—neurochemicals this time—that you experience as “pleasure.” Of course, the experience of pleasure is nothing more than the activation of a particular set of neurons in your brain that encode the experience in mylinized neural axons, so that later, when other cells transmit a chemical deficiency to the prefrontal lobe, it can access that pattern and begin triggering the chemicals in your stomach and tongue to seek out the same chemical, wrapped in the memory of the food in which you found it.

That’s one way of understanding it, and if you really need me to, I can get into specific chemical names for you, too. That’s one level of understanding, and in its own idiom, it’s utterly true. Here’s another level of understanding.

Ancient peoples who liked apples would seek them out more often, so they got more of the sugar they needed and survived more often. So their apple-preferring genes were passed on more often, and eventually, everyone loved apples.

That’s one way of understanding it, and if you really need me to, I can get into specific chemical names for you, too. That’s one level of understanding, and in its own idiom, it’s utterly true. Here’s another level of understanding.

You think you like apples, but that is merely the possession of the spirits of your ancestors. They have left part of their spirit in you, in your blood and flesh and bones, and it has left you with some of their same appetites. They loved apples, and now they compel you to go find apples to sate their hunger.

That’s one way of understanding it, and if you really need me to, I can get into specific chemical names for you, too. That’s one level of understanding, and in its own idiom, it’s utterly true.

Which version is true? All of them, of course. No level invalidates the other two. No level is more important than the other two. All three deepen our understanding; all three enrich us. We are at our best, when we are able to understand it on all those levels, simultaneously, without feeling like we have to choose one as “the best.”

Adam, that is true, but I think Jhereg raises the more immediate and important fact. The change from 1900 to 1950 was the biggest change ever experienced by Homo sapiens, and it included some severe “growing pains” because of that, but it was part of a social system predicated on constant change, and always the same kind of change. So is it really “change” in a meaningful sense? Riding along in your car at 35 MPH involves constant change, and yet, not. Hitting the brakes, or turning around—that’s change in a much more meaningful sense, I think.

My suspicion is that the change we’re currently used to are quantitative, whereas the changes that we will need to make are qualitative. And I think that’s a big difference.

there has never been as much fundamental change in the course of human lifetimes as in the last several generations I think it’s fair to say. energy use, population, political, psychological, technological etc, and most people have come for the ride to varying degrees, willingly or not, a few amish and bushmen notable and valuable exceptions. it may seem like we’re resistant to change when you look too closely, but really there’s never been so much nor so much willingness for it. this willingness may in someways be part of our downfall. indigenous societies managed change very carefully I would guess. at this stage, unwillingness to change is of course to our detriment, but the lingering resistance to it perversely might be based on some of our more sustainable social traits.

Janene

You said:
[quote]Jhereg,

I understand it probably better than you think and that is why you might not understand what I am saying. But I am just some random poster on a blog, so that’s nothing against you. [/quote]

My post about the Piraha wasn’t specifically directed at you, in fact, it wasn’t specifically directed at [b]anybody[/b]. It was just intened as group “food for thought”.

As for the rest of the discussion, esp re: evolution…. Well, you’ll all probably find my opinion underwhelming, but, who cares about that stuff? It seems like a tangent to me. A red herring. What is the purpose? I want to understand myself, and I want to understand how I can/should relate to the world, but neither evolution nor morphic fields nor creationism is going to help me one whit with that kind of understanding. There was a time when I thought it would, but really, in the end, I had to admit that I was just going around in circles. Is there something I missed?

Well, looking at peacocks they acually know a whole lot more than you are describing. It is a positive feedback loop, in that the genes for liking cocks with big tails in hens is tied to the male gene for growing big long tails… so the descendants of males with the trait AND decendants of females with appreciation for the trait will also have either big tails or an attraction to big tails.

In addition, there is also a negative feedback loop. If the tail gets too large, the cock cannot function. As a result, if the trait gets too inbred, the animals carrying that exxagerated gene die and/or are unable to reproduce. That removes the genes for unhealthy versions from the gene pool.

Further, the large tail IS an expression of hte health of the animal. A sickly peacock with an extremely large tail will also be unable to survive/propogate his genes. The cost incurred in growing that tail and maintianing and all of the other ‘expenses’ of living would simply be too great for an unfit animal.

Ummm… on lions, you wrote:

Big inbred lions in the Ngorogoro crater with low sperm counts are very successful in mating too. Its because game is so plentiful there that they get huge like 500 lbs, the surrounding area can’t grow lions that big, so all the new lion genes moving into the area come with smaller lions, that are easily defeated.

They may be very successful at mating but they will not be very successful at propogation. So in a few generations, they will no longer BE abnormally large, the gene pools will have mixed to a new, functional stasis.

You also wrote:

It’s a very broad statement. Its not really getting to the meat and potatoes of what the behavior is and what genes are turning on and being acted on. Its not really saying anything. It IS a tautology. Its saying this behavior survived because it was adaptive and was passed on. It was passed on because it was adaptive and survived.

Perhaps. But it is tautalogical in the same way that ‘you can’t have babys if you’re dead — because dead people cannot make babies’ is tautological. Its so obvious that any attempt to explain it gets lost somehow.

Can human beings conect with wild minds as consciousness to consciousness or simply as machine to machine?

What’s the difference? As an animist, are you also a monist? If so then, machine, spirit, consciousness… its all the same. Its just a question of framing.

Janene

But really it could just be that peahens are choosey and that they are impressed with big colorful feathers. So you get a positive feedback loop. Maybe this selects the healthiest peacocks maybe it doesn’t. The health of the cock may be ancillary. Big inbred lions in the Ngorogoro crater with low sperm counts are very successful in mating too. Its because game is so plentiful there that they get huge like 500 lbs, the surrounding area can’t grow lions that big, so all the new lion genes moving into the area come with smaller lions, that are easily defeated.

A lot of these phenomena are blind disteleological factors. But I think some animal behavior is conscious and more akin to the way people behave. My approach is sort of with the opposite of yours. I am saying the European/civilized mindset of animals not having a spirit is wrong, because animals do have a spirit. That to me is the animist approach, not that we are all machines.

You seem to be saying we (animal plant and human alike)are all dead biological machines traveling through time according to blind mechanical processes. So that means we can be animists and connect with each other.

As far as the explanatory power of evolution toward animal behavior, I think you are missing this leap in logic you are making. To say that animals behave a certain way because their ancestors tended to behave in a similar way due to their genes and that lead to their survival through natural selection and so these genes were passed on- is not really saying anything.

It’s a very broad statement. Its not really getting to the meat and potatoes of what the behavior is and what genes are turning on and being acted on. Its not really saying anything. It IS a tautology. Its saying this behavior survived because it was adaptive and was passed on. It was passed on because it was adaptive and survived.

Its nice and neat, but it stops short of illustrating what is really going on inside these animals heads.

Maybe I am wrong. I don’t want top be presumptuous about you. Do you look at all this from a materialist position of metaphysical naturalism? Is this the way actual animist hunter gatheres look at this?

Can human beings conect with wild minds as consciousness to consciousness or simply as machine to machine?

Would there be a biological instruction to reduce voracity?

Sure: something that’s equally voracious, but eats you. Or at the very least checks you. But such limits can never be expected from the species itself. We don’t let people preside as judges at their own trials, and no species will ever check its own appetites. Really, I’m not sure it can. So can humans hack our biological code to make us less voracious? I doubt it. We’re not really able to check ourselves, but we can be checked. And we will be—one way or another.

Humans are prey to other animals—in Africa, where we evolved. In other areas, animals have yet to figure out that we’re delicious. That makes us alpha predators. They exist. They’re still checked, but by relationships more subtle than predator-prey. They’re checked by food supply, or by competition, or any number of other factors that help rein them in, all beyond their own control. Obviously, the food chain has to end eventually with something that’s only eaten by worms, insects and bacteria. We didn’t free ourselves from predator-prey relationships anymore than any other alpha predator—wolves, bears, lions or sharks. We’re not reducing how nature controls our population at all, we’re just upping the ante, trading cut-offs now for more catastrophic cut-offs in the future.

Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems.

Of course, the more problems, the more solutions.

Thinking like a fungal organism, the greater variance in substrates, the greater chance I have in sporulating and creating new organisms.

Would there be a biological instruction to reduce voracity? Easily, our scientists could come up with a bleach-resistant hyper sporulating organism that attcks and devors mammilian flesh, and yet our scientists, and opportunistic organisms, have yet to do such a thing.

The flesh is a huge cornocopia of substrate to explore and devour.

Of course, killing one’s food supply would kill oneself.

So why is man not the prey of any animal?

Could we have been the first organism to free ourselves from predator-prey relationships?

We are rapidly reducing how nature controls our population.

With the common cold cured, is there hope for man?

What then is remnant from our single-cell ancestors that could be seen as the hardwiring required for infinite possiblities of life (on this planet).

I’d say that all life on this planet is hardwired with a command that really can’t be better expressed than the first mitzvah in Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” Well, subdue has more to do with our fantasies, but every species on earth reproduces to the best of its ability, and aspires to fill the whole earth with its own kind.

The trick that makes this work, of course, is biodiversity. Flies are trying to multiply as much as possible, but then, so are spiders. So are plants that flies eat. So are frogs that eat flies. So are daddy long-leggers that eat spiders.

When I set up my tent, each pole is trying to pull the whole thing in its own direction, and if it got its way, the whole tent would fall down. But it’s balanced against three other poles, all pulling in opposite directions. Because they’re all trying to pull the tent in their own direction, my tent stays up. Likewise, what would happen if this weren’t hardwired into all biology? What would happen if, say, flies decided they didn’t want to reproduce so much anymore—if they could just decide to rein in their population and not grow so much? What would happen? What would happen to the spiders, and the frogs, and the plants, and the daddy long-leggers? Look at the wolves in Yellowstone. Nature establishes a dynamic equilibrium, and the main, fundamental force that makes it all hold together is that every animal is following the first mitzvah with every ounce of strength it has.

The problem isn’t following the first mitzvah—it’s when the balance is broken, when you’re actually able to make good on that ambition. It’s when the other poles suddenly reach that tipping point and fail when the tent comes crashing down. It’s when humans gain control over their own food supply that mass extinction and ecological disaster loom large.