Pious Baboons
Taken from this Aphorism I wrote in 2003.
Can there be no doubt that a frustrated organism will generate novel responses as a means to overcome that frustration? Furthermore, can not one of the responses be vocal in nature?
Suppose a primate frustrated with the actions of another in the troop emits a sound of frustration towards that primate. Further suppose, that the response by the other primate then was to modify their behaviour, in such a way, that the frustration of the vocal primate is reduced. Ah, but we need a process of natural selection, we need to Darwinify the argument.
What we need are primates within a troop that ‘realizes’ their verbalizations, are recognized as frustration, by the other primates (1). This group would yield significant power over the other primates because they would be able to recognize other brain states and capitalize by manipulating such states. Adaptive value would be the acumen of other’s brain states and the ability to influence these brain states via demonstrable behaviour (I.e. verbal utterances).
Could this mean that language finds its genesis in frustration. What is frustration but mental perturbation, I suppose it should be no surprise that the priest created language. How else would he generate frustration as a means to control?
Finally Christians have an argument God’s existence: Some entity necessarily must exist to give life to Darwin so that he could give adaptive value to the ecclesiastic baboon.
UPDATE: Man I must really like this aphorism I have already posted about it.
March 14th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
So, when did you first come up with your theory that frustration motivates all of human activity? Was it during your third year of grad school rejections and no girlfriend? Or maybe the sixth year?
But yeah, it is something that gets left out of the evolutionary psych story.
March 14th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Way before any of that. Besides I think I still had a girlfriend when the third round of rejections rolled in. Well at least it was on the penumbra of the end of our relationship.
I totally added to this comment just so I could use the word ‘penumbra’.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:10 am
First: Not all organisms will generate a novel response when frustrated; some simply fail, and evolution will take its course by eliminating said organism from the gene pool.
Second: Either your frustration theory is wrong, or grad school rejection is not frustrating, because I have not seen you take a novel approach to applying to doctoral programs.