Wednesday, March 30

Delusional

The evolutionary revolutionary by Drake Bennett includes a passage from Robert Trivers' introduction to Richard Dawkins's "The Selfish Gene."
If deceit, he wrote, "is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray-by the subtle signs of self-knowledge-the deception being practiced." Thus, the idea that the brain evolved to produce "ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution." We've evolved, in other words, to delude ourselves so as better to fool others-all in the service of the great game of propagating our genes.
Via aldaily. Will Wilkinson mentions him, too.

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