DianeG

Hempgraphene, unless you can add something even remotely scientific to the discussion besides your personal preferences, you'll be dismissed as a troll. And incidentally, an explanation for how genetic traits can persist in a population, when they might seem to be a survival or reproductive disadvantage, was already provided, but not addressed by you. I might also add that the argument that natural selection has completely stopped simply because of the intervention of modern medicine, is also false. Many genomicists assert that the exponential increase in human population in the last few centuries actually gives evolution more kicks at the can, so to speak, and increases the likelihood of positive selection of traits. What's more humans are actively working to reduce the occurrence and inheritance of certain deleterious genes, (like say Huntington's disease). You might not consider that "natural" selection in the direct sense, but it never the less is behavior that affects future genetic inheritance. ps. Humans are animals too. For future reference: Domain: Eukaryota (unranked): Unikonta (unranked): Opisthokonta Kingdom: Animalia Subkingdom: Eumetazoa Superphylum: Deuterostomia Phylum: Chordata Subphylum: Vertebrata Infraphylum: Gnathostomata (unranked): Amniota (unranked): Synapsida Class: Mammalia Subclass: Theriiformes Infraclass: Eutheria Magnorder: Boreoeutheria Superorder: Euarchontoglires (unranked): Primatomorpha Order: Primates Suborder: Haplorrhini Infraorder: Simiiformes Parvorder: Catarrhini Superfamily: Hominoidea Family: Hominidae Subfamily: Homininae Tribe: Hominini Subtribe: Hominina Genus: Homo Species: Homo sapiens Subspecies: Homo sapiens sapiens

I think people become more herd like or tribal when they feel threatened - the question is why do they feel so threatened? Or another hypothesis my be that ideology is replacing the sense of belonging that other groups - extended family, neighborhoods, towns, churches, businesses - used to provide, and now these things seem less reliable.

Well, you're right, I've seen both lack of patriotism or racism used in kind of knee-jerk accusations. But the opposite is true as well - people claiming that someone is "just playing the race card" and does not have any sort valid complaint or observation regarding inequality. Maybe it's better not to attribute broad and sinister motivations in most political debates and stick to more concrete cause and effect relationships. But when someone like Spencer flat out tells you the races will never get along and shouldn't mix, it's not a speculative leap to call that racism. I have always been interested, though, in how internal struggles within movements or groups play out -when members of a group, whether it's feminists or Christians or one of the parties, become so divided on key issues, that they no longer want to be associated with one another. Some faction either has to adopt a new identity, or come to some compromise. Although the Republican party is dominant in American politics, and in a much stronger position than Democrats, I also feel like there is a big schism in the GOP in it as well. Trump represents a new populist party despite not renaming itself. Trump and Republicans in congress have a gentleman's agreement for now, but who knows for how long. Another topic that interests me is bias in general. I often think it would help if people looked at bias more scientifically and less as a moral issue, more like an information processing problem or bad heuristic. One can be biased without an deliberate desire to do harm to others. It is the blame and guilt associated with the issue of bias that keeps people from acknowledging it. Not that the Spencers and Dylann Roofs of the world don't exist, not to mention deliberate political gerrymandering, but much bias is also unintentional.

I know Bannon claims that the alt-right is not truly racist and that the neo nazis, white nationalists are just the fringe. He says they will eventually "wash out." Still, it's a bit difficult to reconcile that excuse with speeches he has given about there being a global struggle between Christians of European dissent and Islam. He might see it as more of a philosophical struggle than racial, but the nod to the superiority of Western civilization, and everything that implies, is still there. And certainly Richard Spencer is an unabashed white nationalist. In an interview with NPR, I heard him talk extensively about his belief in the natural, biological basis of racial conflict and segregation The idea that racism is just a "straw man" starts to look more like a "no true Scotsman fallacy," if significant numbers of self proclaimed leaders like Spencer espouse those views in no uncertain terms. Spencer did, after all, invent the term alt right, so I guess he gets to decide what it means.

There would be both strong evolutionary pressures re-enforced for both. But I'd say hunger trumps sex for several reasons, even though sex is more directly related to offspring. The key factor is time. You can postpone sex and reproduction a month or even a year or two if for some reason you have to, with out a great impact on the total number of progeny you might give birth to. You cannot postpone eating and drinking water without immediate impacts on survival - and consequently the ability to reproduce. So food and water will always come first up to some basic sustaining limit, after which sex might tend to dominate. So it's not really "either/or" - it really depends on which part of the spectrum of deprivation or abundance you are looking at.

While certain processes are not under direct conscious control, Stanislas Dehaene says many processes can be either /or, and it depends on certain thresholds of stimulation in one part of the brain, and the extent to which it spreads to, or is shared with other parts of the brain. In his book "Consciousness in the Brain" he describes experiments demonstrating actions once thought to be entirely conscious can be processed below the level of awareness - things like processing numbers or the meanings of words. I'm not sure about prizing conscious or subconscious processes as more critical for survival, or entirely separate, is accurate, as automatic processing frees up conscious processing to attend to things that require choice or flexible responses. Also consciousness can be quite sluggish - not the best for sudden threats or hitting a fastball.

When my farmer husband had pigs, he would hang a tire from a beam in the barn in their pen so they would have something to play with. He said this kept them from getting bored and biting other pigs.

If it comes from nature, it's natural. There are lots of different kinds of phenotypical variations in nature, and whether one labels them a disorder or defect of some kind usually depends on whether they cause suffering or dysfunction. Even a word like "normal" is not very helpful, since some phenotypes are less common than average, but we don't consider them disorders - for example, being left handed, having blue eyes, having AB blood. I would classify homosexuality in the same way - a variant, not a disorder. The question that makes people sometimes wonder about whether homosexuality is "natural" is why it would not be selected out in evolution, since homosexual men would be less likely to reproduce. One interesting theory I came across was that homosexuality in men might be related to a gene variant on the X chromosome that is reproductively advantageous when it appears in women, but not in men. The gene never comes to dominate the population, but never entirely gets selected out either. In the book Genome (p 117) Matt Riddley explains that "One candidate is a region Xq28 on the tip of the long arm of the chromosome. Gay men shared this same version of this marker seventy percent of the time; straight men shared a different marker version of this marker seventy-five percent of the time. Statistically, that ruled out coincidence with ninety-nine per cent confidence." He goes on to say "because an X chromosome spends twice as much time in women as it does men, a sexually antagonistic gene that benefited female fertility could survive even if it had twice the as large a deleterious effect on male fertility." All of this is somewhat hypothetical - Ridley did not say what genes in this region actually do. There may be other genes involved as well. Subsequent studies have given mixed results. But it is, I think, a helpful explanation why a genetic phenotype might survive in a population when it would seemingly be a disadvantage in some way, and there are other examples of this phenomena in genetics.