Wow, that’s bleak.
Perhaps it’s true if you’re operating in an amoral framework.
The society I was raised in has aphorisms such as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “love thy neighbor” as pretty basic tenets (not that they’re often completely lived up to). Pretty much every human society has similar basic rules. I like to think they’re meaningful.
Evolution doesn't know morality, unwarrantedly nice guys finish last.
[citation needed]
> Evolution doesn't know morality, unwarrantedly nice guys finish last.
Incorrect. Citation:
If you want narratives: the introduction of agriculture to human society is a cooperative effort which generalizes labor such that some can provide for the food supply and others can pursue other forms of labor, e.g. intellectual labor. The strictly competitive approach would not favor the establishment of agriculture. Human progress is measured in cooperation; in fact our cooperative nature it is one of the distinguishing traits of humanity and is largely responsible for the establishment of complex society, which was the greatest evolutionary achievement of humanity over the rest of the animal world.
Would the device you wrote your comment on have been possible without a nigh-incomprehensible level of human cooperation?
If you wish to build a society without cooperation, you are welcome to start your potato farm on a free plot of land out west. The potatoes you grow, by the way, were a product engineered by millennia of cooperative bioengineering on the part of indigenous farmers, but feel free to disregard that in your daydreaming.
You couldn't just rock up to an ancient village and expect to be fed for you intellectual labour. That's the whole point - outsiders are not part of the village until proven otherwise.
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_fitness_in_humans
> However, independently of the emergence of inclusive fitness theory, from 1960s onwards many anthropologists themselves had reexamined the balance of findings in their own ethnographic data and had begun to reject the notion that human kinship is 'caused by' blood ties (see Kinship). Anthropologists have gathered very extensive ethnographic data on human social patterns and behaviour over a century or more, from a wide spectrum of different cultural groups. The data demonstrates that many cultures do not consider 'blood ties' (in the genealogical sense) to underlie their close social relationships and kinship bonds. Instead social bonds are often considered to be based on location-based shared circumstances including living together (co-residence), sleeping close together, working together, sharing food (commensality) and other forms of shared life together. Comparative anthropologists have shown[6] that these aspects of shared circumstances are a significant component of what influences kinship in most human cultures, notwithstanding whether or not 'blood ties' are necessarily present (see Nurture kinship, below).
I like how easy you and p-e-w are making it to debunk your argument by citing a bunch of sources that don't support you. I think you're just racist conservatives making up facts from whole cloth to support some narrative of deintegration.
I’ve been trying to discuss with them on the merits of their argument, but having thought on this overnight I agree with you.
All their big argumentation and lofty words are, at their base, seemingly trying to defend a basic position that it’s okay - perhaps even desirable - to base desire to associate with someone solely on their ‘shape’ (obviously, skin color).
Hell, even French-speaking and Dutch-speaking Belgians consider each other "other".
It's rather disappointing that on HN, where members regularly congratulate themselves on being able to examine viewpoints on their merits alone, you have chosen to drag this conversation into the mud with personal attacks. I will not engage in such behavior myself, and this pretty much concludes the matter for me.