Subject: 
        [evol-psych] Re: Richard Dawkins: Our big brains can overcome our selfish
        genes
   Date: 
        Wed, 13 Feb 2002 10:34:26 -0600
   From: 
        Mark Flinn 
     To: 
        [email protected]




This argument centers on Richard Alexander's "triple paradox" that he 
describes in The Biology of Moral Systems (1987).  Our minds have 
evolved mechanisms that result in emotions and cognitive processes 
that result in "ethics" and "altruism" in normal human social 
environments.  But our emerging awareness of these processes and 
their evolved functions is a novel situation.  Awareness of 
evolutionary function allows for a new kind of introspection, and a 
new kind of ethics.
-- 
Mark Flinn
Department of Anthropology
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211
(573) 882-9404