"Madam Butterfly lulled me to sleep-in a town without pity where the water was deep." B. Dylan.
It's a free country (was?), feel free to avoid me.
For now I'll dwell on some basics because maybe someone will view this who is unfamiliar with some of them.
Regarding evolution, a few comments.
There is an intense duality about evolution.
from Darwin "The individual is the agent of evolutionary change." or something similar. That is to say, the individual geneticly endowed with some trait which promotes either survival, reproduction or both, is the agent of evolutionary change.
But; the individual does not evolve.
The individual develops but, except in science fiction, the individual does not evolve. Each is born and dies with the same set of chromosomes.
Competition; there is competition for resources between species and within species.
Then there is competition for reproductive opportunity.
Competitive sexual selection does not occur in solitude. It occurs amid the social-cultural system of the particular species. The individual is not consulted; it means everything to the individual.
Different realms of logical reference are involved.
The general case of populations, species and evolution.
The special case of the individual.
Mixing these produces the logical fallacy of equivocation.
Mostly, the difficulty encountered in dealing with the concepts I tend to present is the general preference for addressing individual experience.
For example- Freud, so near but yet so far, so close but no cigar.
For instance, Freud identifies individual actors and responses in his Oedipal Complex theory.
But, the actions involved are motivated by the drives I have enumerated.
Dependence drive, competitive sexual selection, not by individual actors.
Individual experience produces individual development, starting with neonatal experience but these all occur within
an established range.
The questions of importance then, are what is the nature of the competitive processes and what increases or decreases their effectiveness.
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