Re: Re: poly: Missing Sperm Donors

In a message dated 1/13/98 11:00:37 AM, hanson@econ.berkeley.edu wrote:

>Many women I've known have seemed to have strong drive to have
>and hold a baby of their own. They then use their cognitive
>abilities to figure out how to get such a baby. I think many
>men similarly have drives for kids of their own, which they
>then use their cognitive abilities to figure out how to get.

We use our cognitive abilities to achieve our drives. However,
what the kind of drive you're referring to is mostly the desire
to have and hold the baby - not the desire for the abstract
knowledge of the possibility of the baby's existence, which
is all a sperm donor will get. Drives for experience appear
much easier to evolve than drives for particular abstract
knowledge.

>So I don't think its that evolution hasn't adjusted to the
>fact that we have brains and can use them to get what we want.
>It's more that the particular things we are driven to want
>are not as abstract as the things our genes actually want.
>So there are cases left out, cases which once were negligible,
>but are now important.

Yes, obviously even if evolution can do such a thing, it hasn't
yet had a chance. But I can't think of any particular abstract
knowledge we have a drive for (the drives for curiosity and
religion operate mostly independently of their intellectual
subjects.) That, I think, demonstrates that genetic evolution has
a hard time generating drives for particular abstract knowledge.
Received on Wed Jan 14 01:42:25 1998