Houlley
The pencil analogy is apt. It is easier to accept we won't and can't know everything. There is a kind of peace in that and perhaps simplicity, rather than over-analysis, is the first step to contentment (or whatever name you want to put on it).

Dear Anti,

The following book may be worth looking at:

"Human Societies," by Gerhard Lenski and Patrick Nolan.
10th updated Rev. Edition.
Paradigm Publishers. ISBN 1594511438. 480 pages.
(Paperback.)

David, what a fascinating talk from EO WIlson. The eusociality idea is one I've been trying to get my head around in my own poor way and he put it together beautifully. Society isn't arranged in a hierarchy from the top down, it's from the inside out, literally. The goal at every level is to give women a chance to have their babies in well protected, well fed, well cared-for conditions. For our society as a whole, wealth and power grade toward the centre so there is a common drive to acquire them to get closer to the centre which aligns with the goal above, to get women into the centre of a protective structure.

It all emerges from Dawkins' extended phenotype and selfish genes, so that our social behaviours emerge from our genetic programming and enhance the propagation of our genes. Kinship is only one way to do that, because we're all ultimately assembled from the same genes, so in a large population, if everyone assists everyone, the population genes as a whole do well. In a small population, the local variation is greater, so family loyalty wins out in any competition.

Thanks for putting it up, I'll be watching other talks on that site.

Lexi, I'll see if I can find them.

Houellie, we can understand the mechanisms and the motivations, we don't have to understand the rationalisations.

Pelican, free will is not incompatible, it's just that a random exercise of free will is amenable to probabilistic analysis. What an individual does is important to the individual and those who interact with that individual, but in most cases it's able to be represented as one of a few types of behaviour.

Determinism is detailed, chaotic and subject to big non-linear outcomes, while stochastics are not, within a given set of conditions.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what's made of it all.

Anti
You are most probably right about free will - I hope so. People react differently to various stimuli and I pondered whether those behaviours are already set. It would be scary to think that everything we do is beyond our 'control' and that we are ever designed to repeat the pattern of our DNA in response to those stimuli.

There is an implication in that it suggests there is no room for change. It could be argued that the ability, will or potential for change and reform is also inherent in that patterned response.

It is way too complex for me. :)

No, there's plenty of room for change. The system's components are constantly changing and deterministic events can have big implications.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_agency

It's fascinating stuff.

In my opinion there are only a few ways for people to arrange themselves, which are scale dependent and emerge as conditions change, only a few ways to act and only a few reasons for them to want to act at all. They interact to produce the complex behaviours that humans engage in, with individuals driven to form groups at every level and being both influenced by and influential on their groups. The whole lot is undepineed by a eusociality that manifests as a culture.

It's chaotic, but with underlying order that should be amenable to being understood mathematically as a dynamical process.

I don't have the maths to do it, though obviously some do. It's only a matter of time.

Anti
Certainly there are many choices humans have in response to various situations. Why we choose one over a myriad of choices is interesting. What factors are at play, both internal and external, that lead to that outcome? What aspects have the strongest influence.