Letters to the Editor
J.C. Miller
Published Letters: 322 Editor's Choice: 34
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Sorry.
[Read the article: Manufacturing belief]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Selection has worked primarily by differentially eliminating pre-reproductive individuals either by virtue of their relative vulnerability to mortality or traits in their protectors which lead to differential mortality, and through competitive mating systems. Genes are left by individuals who survive to reproductive age and win access to reproductive resources. In contrast, somatic lethality of stress (stroke, heart attacks) occurs late in the life cycle (well after winners and losers have sorted out in the mating game and offspring have survived their most vulnerable stage). Moreover, some level of hyperarousal (anxiety) in dangerous and competitive ancestral environments would actually be adaptive and work toward increasing rates of successful couplings and of survival of protected offspring to reproductive age. Leaving it up to The Lord and stress reduction would likely have diminished chances of survival to reproductive age and mate acquisition in environments in which life was competitive, brutish, nasty and short.
Religious belief likely did factor strongly into mating and reproductive systems, differential reproductive success, and survival of individuals in protective groups, but not “religious belief” as generously and defensively constructed. Look at the codes and prohibitions in systems of religion and who constructed them. They reflect males prescribing sexual conduct (mating systems), control of material resources, authority and conformity - all features which, if they can only be enforced, would favor the rule-makers differentially sending their genes through time. Incentive for the prescribed behaviors is provided by the instilled fear of earthly and eternal suffering and punishment, delivered by an ultimate authority figure.
That is, religion, somehow confused with spirituality, is an adaptation which in historical environments served to perpetuate certain traits and genes by controlling individual (especially sexual) and group behaviors through fear of powerful negative consequences. It is not a coincidence that religion so often provides a cover for sexual coercion and abuse of power differentials sexually.
Given its nature and impetus in needs for conformity and control of behavior, it is natural that religion would infantilize spirituality and the relationship of the individual to the metaphysical – God must be constructed as an all-knowing, punishing agent apart from the world rather than as diffuse, universal and in process. “Morality” regresses to behavior controlled by fear and shame.
Oddly, Wolpert and others seem to believe that in noting logical or empirical weaknesses in an infantilized construct that has been a factor in human behavior and possibly in differential selection, they are saying something about the world.
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No.
[Read the article: Getting blown up, again and again]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]1. PTSD is not a brain injury.
2. Exposure, desensitization and narrative therapies are not about re-traumatization.
3. They are not Freudian.
4. They are relatively successful.
5. They are not about confrontation.
6. There is not a Freudian fantasy.
7. Less cannabis would likely help.
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The readers are getting it,
[Read the article: The losers' circle]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]despite Ms. Kolata’s confusion. We’ve heard all this before – alcoholism is a disease, it’s genetic, you inherit it or “get it” like you become afflicted with diabetes or cancer. These stories are a way to avoid looking at the environmental stressors that drive anxiety and lead individuals to attempt to soothe negative emotional states using substances: nicotine, alcohol, food. Evidence for environmental correlates of anxiety driving compulsive abuse of harmful substances, like food, is pervasive. The discomfort we would experience in addressing those pathological economic and social stressors (our cherished way of life) is less tolerable than the public health costs of substance abuse.
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Biological roots
[Read the article: Who's your daddy: The search for sperm donors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Paternity and maternity as identified by contribution of gametes evolved because, under certain environmental conditions, juveniles whose care was more assured by certain designated adults driven to identify with and care for them had higher survival rates to reproductive age than juveniles whose care was not as assured by such biologically-driven identification and commitment of caretakers. Likewise, under certain evolutionary contexts, survival and selective advantage of progeny has been conferred on individuals who are driven toward other behaviors, like use of aggression and violence to gain resources, siblicide, infanticide, and rape. The fact that natural selection formed traits, or tendencies, over past millennia and ancient environmental contexts carries no normative or adaptive mandates for autonomous humans in contemporary conditions.
Except, of course, by virtue of the stories and fears we carry in our minds. Those stories and fears – about “mothers” and “fathers”, fears of change and of authenticity, fears carried by adults of displeasing mommy and daddy – are what keep us from facing barriers to real parenthood, which is impaired by kinship identification. To the extent that individuals are normatively constructed as caretakers of biologically related children, those children’s development will be impaired precisely because a “parent” thus constructed and granted ownership of offspring is invested (as we consistently observe) less in the growth, self-actualization and autonomy (i.e. well being) of the child as individual than in some idealized and normative model of how “my son” or “my daughter” contributes to the parent’s own attempt to validate self, family name, and social standing as prescribed by pathological social expectations for “success”.
This pathology of kinship, enforced and celebrated by patriarchy as “family”, “motherhood” and “fatherhood”, is the single greatest barrier to the loving and competent care of children and is represented by a culture of “adults” functioning as frightened, dependent children afraid of the disapproval of fictionally constructed “mothers” and “fathers” and afraid of shaming their “families”, rather than as autonomous beings free to choose relationships and to construct themselves.
“Biological roots” and longing for a “biological relationship” (whatever that could conceivably mean) matter to children and create anxiety only because of the maladaptive fictions we perpetuate and ingrain in them, fictions which would not be needed apart from maladaptive drives toward monogamy and identification of a male and female “parent” who somehow have rights to them.
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cost of wedding
[Read the article: The marriage industrial complex]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Is a book and discussion on the appropriate cost of a wedding helpful in distracting attention from marriage as a form of prostitution and marriage as a representation of the failure of love and escape from adulthood ? Just wonderin.