[kj] FW: Re: Funny KJ tracks?

[B. Oliver Sheppard]

It goes without saying we're capable of committing mass murder and 
bloodshed as a species; we've done it. It also goes without saying we're 
capable of being kind, noble, generous, and altruistic; we've done that, 
too. When a soldier throws himself on a bomb to save his comrades, he is 
being altruistic and, form an evolutionary standpoint, his particular 
genetic structure ends -- he's out of the evolutionary gene pool, dead. 
People have done this, even if "only the fit survive." Sometimes we 
honor those who give of themselves and don't survive.

We're not genetically trapped into a certain set of behaviors. We can 
choose how to act, though impulses may urge us in a certain direction.

-Oliver




Brendan wrote:

> What I was getting at was more that we're still hard-wired to be primal,

> physical, aggressive etc. I wasn't saying that all of our behaviour in

> response to stress involved the fight or flight adrenal dump. But check

> out your blood pressure and heart rate, flush response etc when you're in

> a stressful situation, even one that you manage to handle okay.

> Disciplinary meeting at work, asshole customer, nothing that involves any

> phyiscal threat whatsoever, just stress. There is often still a physical

> response...the body preparing for battle or flight. Those hormones and

> reactions always need to be controlled, they're there under the surface,

> you can master them, most of the time, but I think they play a big part.

>

> And in the absense of any more highly developed faculties, as in religious

> fundamentalists such as the Taliban and the christian and other

> equivaltents, all you end up with is a stupid animal willing to destroy

> other people who don't agree with their hopelessly limited reality tunnel.

>

>   

>

>