Hi everybody,

> *Sorry I always write so much. The rest of you should make
> me feel less verbal by contributing. Eric?

How can I resist a direct appeal? :-) I like the answers other people have said already.I think I recall reading somewhere that anger makes quite a lot of evoluntionary sense. If you know I am likely to respond to provocation with a disproportional, random response, then you are less likely to provoke me. So even in the context of a society it makes sense; and also of course Todd's point about focusing energy is sensible. Plus: anger increases adrenalin, so my body is prepared for "flight or fight" and thus my body is going to help me out with my anger response if I go with the "fight" option.Religion: what about the popularity of religions that encourage having offspring, or discourage birth control? Or that encourage converting others? These are fairly powerful ideas with some sort of evolutionary pressure. I recall some clever person quite a while ago invented the idea of "memes", in analogy with genes. Memes are ideas which, as side effects, tend to propagate themselves. For example, I play bridge, and part of the bridge meme is that I go out and teach other people to play bridge. The religion memes are fairly powerful. (Who invented memes? Was it Gould? Marvin Minsky?

)> 3. sense of purpose. for example, the work week is 40+ hours, but we
> could feed and clothe everyone with much less work than that. where
> does our work ethic come from?

Hmmmm. Work hard = you are successful = more likely to attract a mate and more likely to afford good living conditions, good medical care, etc. Your children are more likely to be healthy and thus reproduce themselves. Of course, thoughts like this lead to Social Darwinism arguments (less hard workers "deserve" to have unhealthy conditions and should suffer evolutionary pressures to not reproduce). I think the flaw in social darwinism is probably that it implies evolution is "good" whereas I agree with Maya that such things simply are. But hopefully the arguments against social darwinism are obvious.

> I think about the origins of human behavior and the reasons
> for all manner of traits every day, and science has only
> illuminated my way and caused greater depth to fascinate me.

I read the book "How the Mind Works" by Steven Pinker a while ago, I recall he is a big fan of evolution and discussed how many simple traits of humans can be sensibly tied to evolution. I really enjoyed the book. I think it focused more on simpler things than morals & personality.

--Eric