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Social Jordan Peterson thread, V.4 - "Darwinian truth" and misreading Nietzsche
- Thread starter Not A Theist
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This is so imprtant to remember.
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Agreed. There's a certain level of depth that these types of discussions reach, that I suddenly realize it's just a ramble and they're pissing into the wind. If you can't summarize wtf you're talking about in a few minutes, then just stop. Go back and figure out how to make it succinct.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan see the discussion of Zerjal 2003.
Is this true?? What are the sources for this amazing claim?
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You're thinking of Goober
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Yeah that's a real frickin skill. I was in a 3 Minute Thesis competition last year and it was rough as fuck. Hell, just writing shorter papers can be misleadingly difficult; i'd much, much rather have 30 pages than 20 to write at a professional level.
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Oh yeah. About as bad when I confused Failcake and Tea cake
D
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Dr. Peterson sure is an idiot. Posters on Sherdog have been discussing religion, philosophy, science, metaphysics, biology, evolutionary psychology, politics, tradition, child rearing and so on for over four threads now because of his stupidity.
How dumb can a person be when he elevates the conversation of fans and haters alike?
How dumb can a person be when he elevates the conversation of fans and haters alike?
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It's a stupid exercise imo. Especially if you're explaining how you arrived at a position rather than just fluffing up a bunch of conclusions like your average TED talk.
That name made me realize that these are basically the theism-atheism threads of yonder.
Cool
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Eh?
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In line with the OP, I'd like to put forth some other criticisms of Peterson. I think starting with the post from another user in the last thread is a good place.
"Like what? I have never heard him misspeak on evolutionary biology or neuroscience. My wife a Psychiatrist, has never heard him misspeak on either. This is where the left piles on because for them truth is social orthodoxy. Maintaining the collective lie is the most important thing because all they care about is the status gained by remaining within that collective, so when it collapses they are left looking the fool." - @Kindacrazy
Peterson wavers from one point to another, cherrypicking facts and using semantics, wordplay and pseudoscientific claims. As an example in regards to evolutionary biology, let's examine his reiteration of the literature on primates and social dominance hierarchy. Notice his appeal to science here btw (hypocritical considering his metaphorical truth spill).
He often choses the aggressive and linear dominance part of chimp social relations, which in reality varies from different groups which he fails to mention (1), instead of chosing examples like the Bonobos who have an entirely different social structure. They are much less aggressive, do not readily fight over territory and use sex as a primary conflict resolution (2). They are equally related to humans as chimps on the genetic level. Moving further, there are other primate species like woolly spider monkeys that are entirely egalitarian with no hierarchiel structures (3), and the vast majority of the research shows that more tolerant and socially inclusive primate species do better AND are more intelligent (4).
Anthropologists suggest that the first tribes of humans lived in egalitarian socieites. This is hypothesized to be part of our evolution and what seperates us from most other primates, and many evolutionary scientist further hypothesize that altruism is a necessary evolved trait of humans (5, 6, 7). Looking further towards human societies today, rank fluctuates between groups and cultural norms dictates vastly different social structures. We funtion as a species and a society within rank, but that's not the entire picture given to us by the scientific literature. It's NOT as black and white as he makes it out to be and either he is unaware of this fact, or he is deliberately misleading his audience.
In regards to neuroscience and biology lets talk about the famous lobster analogy, which no neuroscentist would make. A lobster doesn't even have a centralised nervous system (8). Lobster live at the bottom of the sea, they don't walk upright (in regards to lobster posture), they can regrow limbs, they don't grow old and they eat each other. So what they have serotonin? So does almost every other living thing, including plants. Serotonin in ants also modify their behavior (9), they are also social creatures, is that therefor evidence of the inherent collectivism, as another poster mentioned, and does that show us our natural state is the matriachy? Afterall, they are both anthropods and ants evolved from crustaceans (10). There's so many things wrong with this "analogy", and the fact that Peterson tries to source it as scientifically valid link to human neurophysiology and behavior is disingenuous.
Serotonin in crustacians and other invertebrates does not represent human social interactions, and in humans the role of serotonin is obviously much more complex (11). In fact, even in the research linked on Petersons own site, the study on lobsters claim that while there was a behavorial change in willingness to fight when crustacians were injected with serotonin, this change did not occur if they were placed in close proximity for prolonged periods (12). So EVEN THE REDUCTIONISTIC MISLEADING ARGUMENT is being presented factually incorrect and misleading.
He claims to be an individualist and liberal capitalist, and that government imposing their will on the people is totalitarianism, yet in the case with Alex Jones recently he opted for goverment intervention making these business public utility (I strongly disagree with Jones being banned btw, as much as I think he's a dangerous POS):
He champions as an absolute free speech and rights advocate, yet he supports and participates in propaganda pieces for Prager University (which do not offer a degree btw). Prager U, created by Jewish fundamentalist and neo-conservative Dennis Prager, vehemently censor evolution theory and LGBT rights. Blasphemy is a deadly sin in the bible, hardly the text you'd want to rely on for free speech. Peterson even wanted to create his own university, and was talking about it last year (13). He is seeming more and more delusional.
In a follow up, he also posted a blatantly incorrect, and easily debunked, climate change denying video from Prager U on his twitter:
Peterson rose to fame by fighting the "Social Justice Warriors" which he claims are destroying the very fabric of society, yet he, like many of the anti-SJWs, completely overestimate the impact and prevelance of gender pronouns, safe spaces and anti-free speech sentiments on the left. The entire LGBT is about 3,8% of the population, which is far below what most think (14), and trans people are only 0,6% of the population (15). Have you ever met a single person in real life that wanted you to call them another gender? Homosexuals and trans people have always existed, why is it so important? In regards to the "totalitarian neo-marxist postmodernists" college campuses, while it is true that the left generally are more inclined to want restrictions on hateful speech, a survey from the Knightfoundation and Gallup shows that the clear majority of college students, including democrats, prefers an open environment with offensive speech to a prohibted one with with positive speech (16, 17):
This is not to say that there are not real problems with a minority of college students shutting down speech and being idiots and insufferable, but nothing supports it being the world ending apocalypse that the "anti SJWs" propose and propagandize.
What else... He misrepresented bill C-16 which was already in effect for 5 years in the state the was living in before they started talking about it, he says the bible is archetypes and stories, yet he wont say whether or not he believes jesus rose from the dead, he believes there are no atheist because they would be murderers, he makes presuppositional arguments and claims we cant have morality without the bible, he claims people can only quit smoking because of supernatural experiences, he believes in the supernatural, he claims to hate postmodernism while being the biggest postmodernist around. He waffles and shifts on the topic of religion completely and mixes half truths with pseudoscientific sophistry and lazy philosophy. He's constantly inconsistent in his claims. He calls on science when he needs to, but he cherry picks and misinterpret research, then when he science gets in the way of his argument it means nothing and it's all "metaphorical truths" and "darwinian truths" which he also misinteprets.
Want me to go on? This is just what I can remember without thinking about more of his claims. Dare to say I am taking him out of context.
The claim that early societies were strictly egalitarian is not a widely accepted theory and the reason is obvious.
Every Stone Age tribe modern humans have encountered have extremely strong hierarchies. Indigenous Australians, Amazon tribes, etc. all had very complex hierarchies and social structures.
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Except bonobos still have hierarchies. If you think human beings react to other problems with sex more than violence on a tyrannical level you're just fucking stupid.
You also have hierarchies in literally every form of record history and what we've found before then seems to correlate that too.
@Sano made a long winded post that could be easily disproven by an antropology 101 class describing what kind of shit people threw at each other. He might be very well versed is physiology, but that's extremely different than social structures.
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Uhm, first of all "stone age tribe modern humans" is not an anthropological classfication. Secondly, hunter gatherers are widely egalitarian and the Bushmen are a great example of this.
Where on earth do you get your information from? Hierarchies as we know today are largely a product of agriculture and began in the Neolithicum.
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I don't recall saying they had strictly or completely egalitarian structures, obviously especially intra-family rank seemed to have played a role, but all the evidence I've read suggests that they were largely egalitarian and practiced coorperation and collectivism. We evolved to be hyper-cooperative (1). There might be a few issues with looking at current hunter gatherer tribes, as some of them may have formed after living in an agricultural society which could have changed their societal structures (2). With that said, that's a small caveat and I wont obfuscate your point. I'd like to see the evidence that every modern day stone age tribe has strong hierarchies and don't in large practice egalitarianism. ESPECIALLY strong and liniear dominance hierarchies which is what Peterson promotes. At the same time, feel free to address the problems you have with the sources I cited.
Even the whole "men rank higher than women cause evolutionary biology" schtick does not seem to hold either, as this recent article from Science magazine showed based on CURRENT hunter gatherer tribes that women and men are equal and largely egalitarian in sexual relations (3). Doesn't bode well for the whole Adam and Eve story, nor that the bible is biology manifest.
Yes, the social structures are very complex. I agree. I'm sure that the social and hierarchical structures changes within groups, with some even practicing anti-dominance, but that goes AGAINST Petersons point. His claim that we as humans are biologically wired to only exist in a linear dominance hierarchy, and should therefor forgo or devalue collectivism, is not represented in the literature.
I never said Bonobos didn't have some sort of hierarchy or social formation, nor that we don't. I'm not discounting inherent human violence either (but yes sex has deterred more than a few catastrophic things I'm sure, just think about incells getting laid). I distinctly said that's it's not as black and white as Peterson claims. My argument was not that we are EXACTLY like Bonobos, it was that we are neither exactly like either Chimps nor Bonobos, and that Peterson cherry picks traits within certain primates to support his evolutionary biology claims unfoundedly.
Ah yes, my long winded post could be refuted by an anthropology class 101. Nevermind the fact that I cited articles from Trends in Ecology and Evolution, one of the most respected and cited journals in the field with an impact factor of 16 and the Annals of the New York Academic of Sciences, another well respected journal.
Here's another one from PNAS:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3435232/
Please do enlighten us on what anthropologists say...
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I'm a youth sports coach. I MUST compress wtf I'm talking about
Plus everyone else on the planet seems to talk 100 times more than me, so when I talk I try to make it count. I don't like to compete for airspace, it's just not worth the energy.
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Oh, shit. Sorry. Posted before I saw this.
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While your apology is appreciated, as the chief inquisitor of the forum branch of the Commission of Non-redundancy I must still hunt you down with great haste. I suggest purifying your soul by eating sheets of white paper so that your passing may be as wholesome as possible.
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This reminds me of the Thursday Next series.
