[benkitzelman]

Yeah... but also from the other perspective (the victim / target) - bitterness about the past is poison and for your own good, forgive.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/evolution-the-self/2...

[DoctorOetker]

I think millions of years of natural selection are a better advisor than a stranger on the internet, or teachings of the status quo.

We have the innate capacity to love and hate, to feel attracted or repulsed etc.

If the capacity to be bitter has survived millions of years of natural selection, perhaps it serves a function, however hard we tell each other to look down on it.

[robotresearcher]

Evolution has also produced fatal cancer in infants, among other miserable horrors. The existence of a property in evolved creatures does not imply that it is adaptive.

[DoctorOetker]

Clearly everyone possesses the capacity for bitterness, as they are able to agree on its meaning. Otherwise they couldn't possibly know what the word means.

Clearly natural selection has selected for this capacity.

You pretend to disprove the adaptive nature of a trait by trotting forth "fatal cancer in infants" which clearly natural selection would not systematically select for without good reason. Perhaps artificial human doctrines have the capacity to selectively advantage "fatal cancer in infants" but brutal natural selection wouldn't. Natural selection is the abacus of the grim reaper.

You may call it a dark calculation, but do you know whats worse than a "fatal infant cancer"?

Two or more cases of this "fatal infant cancer"!

I know almost no one who has "fatal infant cancer", yet I have never met a person without the capacity for bitterness.

Your argument is devoid of logic.

[robotresearcher]

You haven’t met many people who died of cancer as infants?

Me neither. Perhaps you and I don’t hang out in the same places as those who died in infancy.

[DoctorOetker]

be reasonable, you tried to insinuate that natural selection selects for fatal infant cancer, instead of against it.

the rate of incidence of "fatal cancer in infants" is extremely low compared to the rate of incidence of the capacity to feel bitter.

[robotresearcher]

I didn’t insinuate that at all. If I thought it was adaptive, why would I use it as an example of a non-adaptive property?

[NoRelToEmber]

> If the capacity to be bitter has survived millions of years of natural selection, perhaps it serves a function

Deterrence being one obvious function.