[wpietri]

> No human alive doesn't want power. That's the basic evolutionary fuel of our entire species. There's no other desire humans even have -- anything else is just a means to that end.

Demonstrably wrong.

Desire for power is certainly common among primates, but there are a number of basic drives. Drives people have it in different amounts. Further, there's no particular reason to think it was a huge evolutionary driver for us.

If you're really looking for the evolutionary driver that made us what we are, it might be a taste for cooked food. [1] You could also make a case for tool usage, or an arms race in language capability, a peacock's tail that happened to let us do far more than woo mates.

And even if power were a major drive, it doesn't really tell us much about what we should do. People are naturally violent, but we mostly set that aside. What's natural tells us nothing about what's right.

Of course you won't believe me, because you write like a fundamentalist. You can't tell a Freudian that it isn't about sex or a Baptist that it isn't all about God. Fundamentalism always makes me a little sad because it's so stunting.

It'd as if somebody put on a pair of blue-tinted glasses and ran around insisting that since they only see blue things, blue is the only real color and everybody else is just fooling themselves. They can't quite get that "everything they see" isn't only about everything; its also about how they see.

Could you be pulling our legs? When you call him arrogant and then explain how only you understand the deep, hidden truths of the world, it's kooky enough that I wonder if you're just trolling.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/14...

[tedks]

>Further, there's no particular reason to think it was a huge evolutionary driver for us.

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=bV9yeFV6_ckC&oi=f...

>People are naturally violent, but we mostly set that aside

This is the most demonstrably wrong thing. Try killing a man and say that you are naturally violent. Humans are social animals and to commit violence against one another is very difficult for us. The people who do not have this trait we call sociopaths. The people who harm others for a living do so at the cost of massive psychological trauma, probably unhealable, and the best and most effective killers have to be taught how to kill for years and years by people who have made it their job to teach how to kill, based on years of research and development of new ways to break people down and build them into war machines.

The most common response to seeing death is to vomit, and you say people are naturally violent? What do you know of violence?

>Could you be pulling our legs? When you call him arrogant and then explain how only you understand the deep, hidden truths of the world, it's kooky enough that I wonder if you're just trolling.

I think it's condescending and ironically, a status-grab to say something like "I pity people who directly pursue the thing I acquire by doing other things. I am better than they are, because I pursue these other, distinct things, that wholly coincidentally lead to the thing these other people pursue. How pitiful they are."

[wpietri]

From the book you link to: "All these hypotheses share one thing: the implication that the cognitive capability we call intelligence is linked with social living and the problems of complexity it can pose."

It's a long, long trip from "linked to social living" (which, duh) to "power is the basic evolutionary fuel". If power were really the big thing, we'd have a social structure and mating relationships more like elephant seals than parrots.

> Try killing a man and say that you are naturally violent.

Yes, that's my point. Your whole approach is a fallacious appeal to nature. You justify your obsession with power by saying that evolutionarily it's all about power. But what is natural tells us nothing about what it right.

Of course we are naturally violent, just like the rest of the great apes. Every toddler quickly decides that violence is a great problem-solver. We put a lot of effort into training them out of it and still don't do very well. Every human society has a history of violence. Every legal code deals with violence. And we do that because violence is natural but wrong.

As to the last bit, that looks like willful misinterpretation. His whole point is that he's not in it for the rewards, that those are mostly luck. As a fundamentalist, you can't of course credit his explanation, so to you it looks disingenuous. Because you only admit of one possible motivation, you take your interpretation as more proof of your obsession. It's the same routine that biblical fundies do. Something good happens? God be praised! Something bad happens? God is making us stronger through trial. Atheists? Well obviously they say those things because they hate God, so clearly they really do believe in God.

For them, it all comes back to God. For you, it all comes back to power. I hope you eventually get over it. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

[tedks]

>Of course we are naturally violent,

...did you read my comment?

Do you think warfighter PTSD is caused by social conditioning?

It's possible to be fundamentalist towards mediocrity, which it appears you are if anyone in this conversation is a fundamentalist.

Sometimes the truth is not in the middle. The truth doesn't care where it is.

[wpietri]

Well if we've reached, "nuh-uh, you're the real fundamentalist" with a side order of personification of abstracts, then I think we're unlikely to make any more progress. Have fun.

[tjradcliffe]

"Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power." --Oscar Wilde. [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6218-everything-in-the-worl...]

Mate competition is a powerful force in human evolution. Evidence: males are 20% larger than females, and the ancient male breeding population is about half the size of the total male population (these are utterly uncontroversial facts, and if you ask any biologist about them without mentioning the species they will say, "Mate competition, moderate polygamy.")

"Power" is the power to mate with the highest status member of the opposite sex available. You'll note this is a gender-free definition.

To deny this is to deny evolution, as it applies to humans. As you correctly point out, what is in our evolutionary history is not what is "right", but unless we are willing to surface that history and examine it in the cold light of day we're like to make a large number of very bad decisions.

So the OP is correct: "No human alive doesn't want power". It does not follow from this "Seeking power by any means available is right." Nor does it mean "Formal hierarchy is the best form of social organization." Sometimes "power" means "the power to boink the lady of the manor". Or as Aristotle might have put it: "Power is said in many ways."

But compared to all other influences on human behaviour, mate competition is pretty important. We forget that at our peril, because it might lead us to weaken social institutions--like monogamy--that tend to undermine mate competition's role as a social organizing principle.

[wpietri]

I agree that mate competition was a force. Not a huge one, though; compare male elephant seals which are not 20% larger, but 200%. But I believe the person I'm replying to is focused on a broader notion of power than merely getting to pick who you can mate with. I think he's conflating status with power, which are related but distinct phenomena. And then he's blowing power up into The Only Thing That Matters, which is what I'm objecting to.

Also, I think the monogamy thing is kooky. Your model there implies that men will be deciding the whole who-mates-with-whom question, with women as property. That is how it works for elephant seals, but it's not the only way. Instead of trying to construct a mandatory monogamy, we could let women also participate in the decision-making process. Novel, I know, but we've been moving in that direction for a century or two and it seems like we're making progress.