The ruling theory posited that the earth shrunk and shriveled, like an old apple, causing mountains to form. Unlike Continental Drift theory It could not explain why mountains were unevenly distributed over the earth, nor why Norway had coal which originated in tropical climates, nor why there were similar fossils on both sides of the Atlantic. Instead, unproven theories of land bridges across continents tried to explain how the animals could have crossed the oceans. [1]

One would expect that in our modern ages,

unlike early scientists, modern scientists proposing radical new ideas do not need to fear the reactions of those entrenched in the existing system. Alfred Wegener is one modern scientist amongst many that demonstrate that new ideas threaten the establishment, regardless of the century.

Alfred Wegener was the scientist who championed the Continental Drift Theory through the first few decades of the twentieth century. Simply put, his hypothesis proposed that the continents had once been joined, and over time had drifted apart. The jigsaw fit that the continents make with each other can be seen by looking at any world map."

Since his ideas challenged scientists in geology, geophysics, zoogeography and paleontology, it demonstrates the reactions of different communities of scientists. The reactions by the leading authorities in the different disciplines was so strong and so negative that serious discussion of the concept stopped. One noted scientist, the geologist Barry Willis, seemed to be speaking for the rest when he said:

                 "further discussion of it merely incumbers the literature and befogs the mind of fellow students.

Barry Willis’s and the other scientists wishes were fulfilled. Discussion did stop in the larger scientific community and students’ minds were not befogged. The world had to wait until the 1960′s for a wide discussion of the Continental Drift Theory to be restarted.

Why did Alfred Wegener’s work produce such a reaction? He was much more diplomatic in presenting his theory than Galileo. Although he believed himself to be right and that some of his arguments were compelling, he knew he would need more support to convince others. His immediate goal was to have the concept openly discussed. Wegener did not even present Continental Drift as a proven theory. These modest goals did not spare him. The fact that his work crossed disciplines exposed him to the territoriality of scientific disciplines. The authorities in the various disciplines attacked him as an interloper that did not fully grasp their own subject. More importantly however, was that even the possibility of Continental Drift was a huge threat to the established authorities in each of the disciplines.

One can’t underestimate the effect of a radical new viewpoint on those established in a discipline. The authorities in these fields are authorities because of their knowledge of the current view of their discipline. A radical new view on their discipline could be a threat to their own authority. One of Alfred Wegener’s critics, the geologist R. Thomas Chamberlain, could not have summarized this threat any better :

"             If we are to believe in Wegener’s hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the past 70 years and start all over again."

He was right.       Wegener, Galileo and Darwin

Alfred Wegener, Galileo Galiei, Charles Darwin

The main problem with Wegener’s hypothesis of Continental Drift was the lack of a mechanism. [...] In spite of the lack of a mechanism for the preservation of traits, Darwin’s theory quickly came to dominate. Within 5 years, Oxford University was using a biology textbook that discussed biology in the context of evolution by natural selection. [...]

Wegener also shares much in common with Galileo. Wegener probably had at least as strong a case for Continental Drift in 1929 as Galileo had for the Copernican model in 1633. The reason many do not realize this is that the controversy is usually presented as a controversy between Galileo and the Church and not Galileo and other scientists (see Galileo’s Battle for the Heavens). As a result most discussions of the early Copernican Model do not even mention any problems associated with the Copernican model. But it was a scientific controversy and it had many of the same elements of the Continental Drift controversy. [...]

From the descriptions above it would be difficult to explain why one of the theories was quickly accepted by the scientific communities, another was quickly dismissed even as a hypothesis, and the other was accepted by some and challenged by others. Interpreting these events from a strictly scientific basis won’t help. All of the theories had some compelling advantages and all had some very serious failings when they were first presented. We might have to look beyond the world of ideas to the world of people, events and things to help answer the question.

Darwin, was the ultimate insider in English scientific circles. His grandfather, Erasmus, was an early student of evolution and his half-cousin, Francis Galton, was a noted statistician who was considered the father of eugenics. Being part of the Wedgewood-Darwin clan meant having no worries about money and established connections in the scientific world. When evolution by natural selection was under attack, Darwin could enlist the efforts of a Who’s Who of mid-nineteenth century English science. The most famous of the early defenses of Darwinism was not by Darwin himself but by the famous biologist, Thomas Huxley and the social philosopher, Herbert Spencer.   Wegener, Galileo and Darwin

Remembering Alfred Wegener

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” This summary, usually attributed to German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, seem especially true of scientific knowledge. Take plate tectonics. The idea that surface of the earth is constantly changing as continents drift around on top of a layer of molten rock is so well established that it’s hard for most people to imagine otherwise. But exactly 100 years ago today, when a 31-year-old German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener presented this idea at a meeting of the Geological Association in Frankfurt, he was mocked. It would take decades and the work of many other scientists – including some prominent Canadians – to show that plate tectonics are as real as gravity and evolution.

Wegener didn’t pluck his idea out of thin air. Most people who look at a map of the world are struck by how neatly the ‘bulge’ of South America seems to fit into the ‘hollow’ of West Africa, but there’s more to it than that. In the fossil record, species found in places like Nova Scotia are often identical with those found in Europe, but radically different from those found just a few hundred kilometres further inland in North America. The idea that ancient creatures could get themselves from Lisbon to Lunenburg but then couldn’t find their way to Montreal required some explanation. Similar patterns are noted across India, South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica, which were all once part of a supercontinent called Gondwana. “For this reason, Southern hemisphere geologists were convinced of continental drift long before anyone else,” says Andrew Miall, Professor of Geology at the University of Toronto. [...]

But the clincher was evidence from magnetic patterns trapped in undersea iron deposits on both sides of the Atlantic ridge. It turns out that the earth’s poles reverse themselves from time to time, and that iron particles in the newly-forming crust along the Atlantic and Pacific ridges align themselves accordingly. By comparing the magnetic patterns trapped in crust from both sides of the ridges, it’s possible not only to show that they are indeed spreading apart, but to calculate the rate (it’s about the same speed as your fingernails grow). Another Canadian, Lawrence W. Morley, wrote a paper on this, but was rejected by both Nature and the Journal of Geophysical Research, only to see it published a few months later by a pair of British researchers, Vine and Matthews.

The skepticism which greeted the unfortunate Morley is characteristic of the attitude toward the new theory, and in some quarters it persisted well into the 1970s. “I was taught nothing at all about the topic in my undergraduate years at University of London, UK, in 1962-1965,” says Miall. “At the International Congress in 1984 in Moscow, it was interesting to note that Russians appeared to have accepted sea-floor spreading but not the drifting of continents . . . how they managed to do this I don’t know!” Remembering Alfred Wegener

Human-Stupidity Analysis

Why does the obvious truth, in spite of strong scientific evidence, take half a Century to gain foothold? From Galileo to Semmelweis, the truth is clobbered by established forces. Nowadays prominent issues are race and iq dogma, child porn panic, drug war based on false dogmas, …

In 1912, when Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist, first proposed that the earth’s continents were moving around, the notion was ridiculed. It took 50 years to gather enough data to prove that he was right.

Wegener’s idea was prompted by the way the continents seem to fit together like pieces of a vast puzzle: most notably how North and South America fit snugly against Europe and Africa. He also pointed to evidence from the fossil record, which showed that similar animal and plant life had once populated both Africa and South America, and suggested that continental drift could explain how mountains form by collisions such as the one between India and Asia that threw up the Himalayas.    
Geologists have found evidence for the existence of a new supercontinent

• Flipped from head to toe: 100 years of continental drift theory
• 100 Jahre Erdplatten-Theorie:  Der verlachte Revoluzzer mit der Weltformel Der Spiegel

Alfred Wegener and continental drift. His idea was poorly recieved when he put it forward. However this was a reasonable reaction at the time. Wegener couldn’t offer any mechanism for his idea and his evidence wasn’t compelling, thus scientists rejected it. It was only after his death that an increasing body of evidence allowed the development of ‘plate tectonics’ as a viable theory and put continental drift on a sound footing.
There is also Doctor Barry Marshall, his idea that stomach ulcers were caused by bacterial infection. It was strongly resisted but unlike Wegener Marshall eventually found the evidence to support his idea and became a Nobel laureate. [...]

Or the scientist who put forward the Table of Elements and the rule of eight.
He was ridiculed by the scientific community for years until others vindicated the work..   
Skeptics are sometimes wrong… but why?

Continental drift theory

Ever since the continents were all mapped, people had noticed that many coastlines, like those of South America and Africa, looked as though they would fit together if they could be moved like puzzle pieces.

Alfred Wegener was one of those people. Though trained as an astronomer, he was a specialist on Greenland. He noticed that, based on nineteenth-century longitude determinations, it appeared that Greenland had moved a mile away from Europe in a hundred years. And Paris and Washington, D.C., seemed to be moving apart by about 15 feet each year while San Diego and Shanghai got about six feet closer. On top of that, Wegener learned that related species, too small to swim the oceans, were found on different continents, as were similar fossils.

In 1912 he proposed that the continents we know today were once all attached in a single landmass he called Pangaea (Greek for "all earth"). They were surrounded by one global ocean, but then broke apart and somehow "drifted" to their separate places on the globe. Although the calculations of Greenland’s movement were found to be due to faulty determinations of longitude, the other evidence seemed to match up: the shape of the continents, fossil evidence, matching rock types and geologic structures, and evidence of ancient climate patterns. But Wegener could not come up with an acceptable way to explain how the continents moved.

Few people accepted Wegener’s views in his day, but they became the center of heated debate. The year after Wegener died, Arthur Holmes published his idea that thermal convection in the earth’s mantle could cause continents to move. Holmes also suggested that the continents didn’t move but were "carried" by larger pieces of the earth’s crust. The controversy quieted down and fell from prominence until the 1960s, when new evidence was brought to the fore. Discoveries of the Mid-Ocean Ridge and the work of Harry Hess and others led to the development of plate tectonics. Though not without problems, this theory has gained wide acceptance. It is the most complete theory of global dynamics yet, and its roots lie in the work of Alfred Wegener.   http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/do12we.html

Alfred Wegener

In 1910, Wegener noticed the matching coastlines of the Atlantic continents — they looked on maps like they had once been fit together. He was not the first to notice this, but it was an idea that would never leave his thoughts. In 1911, he published a textbook on the thermodynamics of atmosphere, but at the same time he pursued his studies of the continents. He first spoke on the topic in January of 1912, where he put forth the idea of "continental displacement" or what later was called continental drift. The year 1912 was busy for Wegener: he got married (to the daughter of Germany’s leading meteorologist) and he returned to Greenland, making the longest crossing of the ice cap ever made on foot.

Though he served in World War I and was wounded twice, he published his ideas in 1915. They constituted the first focused and rational argument for continental drift, but still they veered radically from the accepted beliefs of the time. Some scientists supported him. Still more scientists opposed him — including his father-in-law, who seemed annoyed that Wegener had strayed from meteorology into the unknown territory of geophysics. The established reputation of many of his detractors probably gave more weight to their criticisms than was merited. Wegener often complained of their narrow-mindedness.   
Alfred Wegener 1880 – 1930

People Argue Just to Win, Scholars Assert.

Hugo Mercier is among the researchers now asserting that reason evolved to win arguments, not seek truth. [...]

Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another. Certitude works, however sharply it may depart from the truth. [...]

“Reasoning doesn’t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions,” said Hugo Mercier, who is a co-author of the journal article, with Dan Sperber. “It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.” Truth and accuracy were beside the point.

Indeed, Mr. Sperber, a member of the Jean-Nicod research institute in Paris, first developed a version of the theory in 2000 to explain why evolution did not make the manifold flaws in reasoning go the way of the prehensile tail and the four-legged stride. Looking at a large body of psychological research, Mr. Sperber wanted to figure out why people persisted in picking out evidence that supported their views and ignored the rest — what is known as confirmation bias — leading them to hold on to a belief doggedly in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.    Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth | NY Times

Relevance for real world issues

Human-Stupidity shares the frustrations of many activists, that logical reasoning and unassailable scientific proof are not enough to convert the believers in issues like men’s rights, race and iq, *evolution, political correctness, and drug war. 

We are awe-struck how manipulative language successfully distorts words like *consent, *child, *rape, distorts facts about prostitution. Feminists and religious zealots thus managed to take over the United Nations and enforce world wide law changes based on voodoo theories  and forged science, like sex trafficking and one in four myths. Harvard President Larry Summers was persecuted for questioning some feminist victimization theories. Human-Stupidity posits that women have evolved especially acute language manipulation skills to make up for their physical and economic disadvantages in the EEA. As a result, peer reviewed sound scientific studies get condemned by both the US senate and the US congress by unanimous vote (Rind Study).

Nobel prize winner James Watson had his reputation ruined for well-meaningly stating scientific truths, the same truth that earned renowned scientist J. Philippe Rushton constant persecution. *Discrimination is the explanation for every gender and race difference. We are awe struck how people in high academic positions can get away with drivel like race does not exist.

Don’t miss Robert Kurzban‘s book on the evolution of hypocrisy and meddling in other people’s sex life. Which explains, partially, why lying about a blow job (Bill Clinton) seems to be a worse transgression then starting a trillion dollar war based on lies about weapons of mass destruction (Bush)..

Original scholarly article

Mercier, Hugo and Sperber, Dan, Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory (June 26, 2010). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 57-74, 2011. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1698090 

• Full PDF of article and discussion

Excerpts from Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory

4.1.3. Belief perseverance. Motivated reasoning can also
be used to hang on to beliefs even when they have been
proved to be ill-founded. This phenomenon, known as
belief perseverance, is “one of social psychology’s most
reliable phenomena” (Guenther & Alicke 2008, p. 706;
for an early demonstration, see Ross et al. 1975). The
involvement of motivated reasoning in this effect can be
demonstrated by providing participants with evidence
both for and against a favored belief. If belief perseverance
were a simple result of some degree of psychological
inertia, then the first evidence presented should be the
most influential, whether it supports or disconfirms the
favored belief. On the other hand, if evidence can be
used selectively, then only evidence supporting the
favored belief should be retained, regardless of the order
of presentation. G

4.1.4. Violation of moral norms. The results reviewed so
far have shown that motivated reasoning can lead to
poor epistemic outcomes. We will now see that our
ability to “find or make a reason for everything one has a
mind to do” (Franklin 1799) can also allow us to violate
our moral intuitions and behave unfairly. In a recent
experiment, Valdesolo and DeSteno (2008) have demonstrated
the role reasoning can play in maintaining moral
hypocrisy (when we judge someone else’s action by
using tougher moral criteria than we use to judge our
own actions)

All of these experiments demonstrate cognitively
unsound uses of reasoning. There are two ways to explain
these findings. One could argue that these are instances
of a mechanism designed for individual cognition, and in
particular for decision making, that sometimes gets
misused. According to the argumentative theory, however,
the function of reasoning is primarily social: In particular,
it allows people to anticipate the need to justify their
decisions to others. This predicts that the use of reasoning
in decision making should increase the more likely one is
to have to justify oneself. This prediction has been borne
out by experiments showing that people will rely more on
reasons when they know that their decisions will later be
made public (Thompson & Norton 2008) or when they
are giving advice (in which case one has to be able to
justify oneself [see Kray & Gonzalez 1999]). By contrast,
when they are choosing for others rather than for themselves,
they are less prone to these effects because there
is then less need for a utilitarian, justifiable decision (Hamilton
& Thompson 2007). Finally, it should be stressed that
the picture of reasoning painted in these studies may be
overly bleak: Demonstrations that reasoning leads to
errors are much more publishable than reports of its successes
(Christensen-Szalanski & Beach 1984). Indeed, in
most cases, reasoning is likely to drive us towards good
decisions. This, we would suggest, is mostly because
better decisions tend to be easier to justify.

We have pointed out that, in group settings, reasoning
biases can become a positive force and
contribute to a kind of division of cognitive labor. Still,
to excel in such groups, it may be necessary to anticipate
how one’s own arguments might be evaluated by others
and to adjust these arguments accordingly. Showing
one’s ability to anticipate objections may be a valuable
culturally acquired skill, as in medieval disputationes (see
Novaes 2005). By anticipating objections, one may even
be able to recognize flaws in one’s own hypotheses and
go on to revise them. We have suggested that this
depends on a painstakingly acquired ability to exert
some limited control over one’s own biases. Even among
scientists, this ability may be uncommon, but those who
have it may have a great influence on the development
of scientific ideas. It would be a mistake, however, to
treat their highly visible, almost freakish, contributions
as paradigmatic examples of human reasoning. In most
discussions, rather than looking for flaws in our own
arguments, it is easier to let the other person find them and
only then adjust our arguments, if necessary.

Of course, their answers are also due to politics. A Miss has to be pleasing and diplomatic. A Miss who says the total truth would be too controversial and would be demoted by religious zealots.

Miss USA candidates answering "Should Evolution be taught in School?" | YouTube

Miss California gave a fairly true answer. She actually won! I doubt it was because of her good answer to this question!?

The true answer would be, in Dawkins’ style: "Should the stork theory of child conception be taught in school?" "Should alchemy be taught instead of chemistry. Or should be both sides be taught, Alchemy and chemistry?". Evolutionary theory is as much a theory as the theory of gravitation.

Let’s be sexist and enjoy what these young women do best:

Miss USA 2011 Bikini Contest |YouTube

First come our preconceived moral judgments. Then we find justifications and victims.

In deciding what other people shouldn’t do, people don’t necessarily start with some principle and go from there. It could have been that moral reasoning was not unlike mathematics-start with a few axioms, and see what follows from them. If people did that, then their moral reasoning would be consistent. Everything follows from the assumptions. But they don’t, or at least, not always.2 

All quotes from:
Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind * (Robert Kurzban)
(p. 188 ff | Kindle Loc. 2322-64)

1. first comes a moral judgment, like "promiscuity is bad", "creeps who possess child porn photos need to be punished", "having sex with adolescents is disgusting" (or "smoking marijuana is bad"). Some of these judgments stem from evolutionary mental modules hard-wired into our minds. Or course, our culture plays a role here too, especially in how we justify our moralistic feelings
2. After the fact, after we already decided that sex with nubile adolescent women is heinous, our mental "press secretary" has to come up with socially acceptable justifications  for punishing people for apparently victimless crime.  So our mind is made in ways that it finds justifications for our moral judgments. It comes up with logical reasons. It invents victims that need to be protected

Tiger Woods, hypocrisy, moral condemnation of promiscuity: where are the victims of a billionaire’s secret dalliances? Tiger Woods: why can’t he have open marriage and have fun?

For things like sex-which many people want to do-people are very happy to apply moral principles. They think that decisions about what is right and what is wrong, what should be permitted and what should be banned and punished, should derive from principles. In this case, the principle is freedom or liberty: People ought to be allowed to do what they want as long as it doesn’t hurt others.

[...] But that’s not the way people make all moral judgments, and by moral judgments here I don’t mean how people decide what they themselves should do-what their conscience tells them. I mean how people decide what other people ought not to do, what other people should be punished for.1 [...]

People seem to judge acts first, and search for justifications and victims afterwards, which strongly suggests that one coherent set of principles isn’t driving moral judgments.

Human-Stupidity suspects that our modern manipulative language distortion stems from such attempts to justify moralistic interference.

Who are you calling a victim?

One way you can tell people make their moral judgments based on nonconscious intuitions is that they can’t explain their own moral judgments, as we’ve seen with Jon Haidt’s work on "moral dumbfounding." People will say that incest is wrong without being able to give any justification for it. Incest is just wrong.

Kurzban is a scientist. He will not argue if incest is right or wrong, He is analyzing the functioning  of the human mind.  He notices that people are totally convinced of the immorality of incestual relationships and can not explain why it is immoral. Even the incestual couple is adult and infertile, it still is wrong.

Many modules seem to cause people to find certain things wrong and to work to prevent others from doing them.Often, people can’t actually tell you the real reason behind those judgments, any more than they can tell you why they think they’re among the best drivers in the country.

Our moral convictions make us find logical explanations and victims at all cost.

We’ve been studying moral intuitions in my lab as well. Peter DeScioli, Skye Gilbert, and I have done some work looking not at moral justifications, but rather intuitions about victimhood. You might think that when people make moral judgments, they first determine if there’s anyone who is a victim-anyone made worse off by the act in question-and use that when they’re making their moral judgment. But we think that for at least some offenses, it’s the other way around.

Researchers got rid of all potential victims from scenarios. If there absolutely can not be a victim, we find a victim anyway

We presented people with a set of "victimless" offenses-things like urinating on a tombstone, burning a flag, cloning a human being, and so on-and asked our subjects if the act was wrong or not. After that, we asked if anyone was harmed by the action. What we found was that almost anyone who said an act was wrong also indicated a victim. But the victims included entities like "humanity," "society," "the American people," "friends of the deceased," "the clone," and so on.

Now, of course it’s possible to argue that somehow these entities really are worse off as a result of the actions. So in a follow-up, we changed the scenarios to get rid of these potential victims. We had a story in which someone urinated on the tombstone of someone with no living family or friends, or a scientist cloned a human being, but the clone was never alive, so couldn’t ever have suffered, felt pain, or worried that she was a clone.
Doesn’t seem to matter. People still judged the acts wrong, and, when they did, they searched for a victim. If the clone wasn’t ever alive, fine, the clone wasn’t the victim: the scientist (somehow) was. If the dead person had no family or friends, "society" was worse off.
People seem to judge acts first, and search for justifications and victims afterwards, which strongly suggests that one coherent set of principles isn’t driving moral judgments.

Here is the explanation for the amazing theories of victimization with child porn, about consensual sex with adolescents being exactly the same as violently raping the same adolescent. These theories actually have become law and terrorize men with long jail sentences.  

OBS: Dr. Kurzban is not responsible for conclusions Human-Stupidity draws from his work.

Immoral judgments aren’t driven by a set of consciously accessible general principles that are applied to particular cases.

Evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban explains
how we gain reproductive advantage by moral condemnation of promiscuity and interfering in other people’s sex life

• Repressive sex laws in the "Land of the Free". Polygyny in birds & human meddling in other people’s sexuality

explains reproductive advantages people can gain from moralistic mental modules with propensity to interfere in other people’s private sex life.

• Older women gain from eliminating their mate’s access to younger nubile women with moralistic rules (against prostitution, limiting age of consent, ….). This is the same as the "sexual trade union" theory of the antifeminist
• average men gain from preventing the alpha top dogs from philandering and monopolizing all available women
• even the alpha male can gain by keeping the competition away from the girls. He can then, hypocritically, violate his own rules (like Eliot Spitzer and so many more). Before the advent of modern courts and the press, powerful men would rarely suffer punishment.

One mental module can happily espouse repressive laws that interfere in other people’s bedroom, and at the same time another module in the same brain, with honest conviction, can defend libertarian ideals of constitutional freedom from government interference in private lives. The theory of the modular mind can conciliate such inner contradictions and self deception.

Inventing victims where there are none.

We have always been baffled about "victimization". The teenage sexuality, child porn, irrational drug prohibition witch hunts are based on victimization theories. These victimization theories are so outlandish, they make the medieval "theory that witches cause hail storm" look like sound science.

Examples

• An adult man victimizes himself by merely possessing a video of himself masturbating when he was 12. Or when he was 12 he victimized himself when he was shooting the video, and thus as an adult he needs to be jailed for his own protection.  The only victim I see is a man being victimized by ludicrous laws.
• You certainly are aware that "Watching child porn victimizes the child". The Voodoo science of child pornography laws": a loner in the US, on a porn search, inadvertently downloads non nude, provocative photo, taken decades ago, in Russia. The moment he downloads or watches the depictions, the model gets victimized, no matter if she is already 50 years old or if she died 15 years ago. Even if it were "real" porn of "real" children, we fail to understand the scientific physical mechanism how the person depicted can be victimized.
• We have trouble finding which victim gets protected by this cruel legal persecution: Mandatory 15 years jail for photos of legal girl friend: You Can Have Sex With Them; Just Don’t Photograph Them.

Outlandish theories find "poor victims" that don’t consider themselves victims, who obviously were not victimized by anyone. 

• Actively consenting adolescent sex partners are victims of the partners they chose.  No matter if the don’t consider themselves as victims: A 15 year old girl initiated a sexual relationship with an older man, intent to marry him. Together with her father, she begs the judge to spare the father of her child and her provider, but to no avail. To protect the poor victim girl, the man goes to jail for a few years.  And even parental rights are over-ridden.
• Sex laws traumatize 14 year old school boy who was happy to have affair with 26 year old woman. He did not think he was a victim of his adult lover.
• We were shocked when we found out that United Nations confesses political manipulation of "child" definition. Thus a billion of additional victims were created: adolescents that were "protected" as if they were children.

Together with the tendency for overcriminalization, our sex obsession, focuses on sexual "crimes" disproportionally, We criminalize formerly normal behaviors: 6-year-old charged with sexual assault for consensual doctor play

Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind (More quotes)

Activities that, for some reason, people want to prevent other people from doing.

Recall the story about consensual incest in chapter 4. People are quite happy to condemn things as morally wrong independently of being able to give any justification for it, let alone a principled justification.

In this chapter, we’ll visit a number of activities that, for some reason, people want to prevent other people from doing. For these issues, my point is going to be very simple. People won’t always be able to say what the reasons are for their judgments and opinions because of the nature of the mind. Just like split-brained patients, and just like all the examples we’ve seen in which the press secretary of the mind doesn’t know what’s going on elsewhere in the brain, people are not always going to know the reason why they morally condemn certain acts.3

Many modules seem to cause people to find certain things wrong and to work to prevent others from doing them.Often, people can’t actually tell you the real reason behind those judgments, any more than they can tell you why they think they’re among the best drivers in the country.

Further, because these judgments are made by different subroutines, there is an inordinate amount of inconsistency. With no one principle, or even set of principles, guiding moral condemnation, moral judgments don’t necessarily cohere in any meaningful way.4

So, the reasons you give about what you think is wrong, or should be illegal, aren’t very often the causes of your moral judgment. That’s not to say that your moral judgments aren’t reasonable ones. It’s just that the reasons you give for them aren’t the real ones. Your press secretary modules don’t really know what your moralistic modules are up to.

All quotes from:
Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind * (Robert Kurzban) (p. 188 ff | Kindle Loc. 2322-64)

Moral Trolley dilemma

Another way you can tell moral condemnation isn’t based on a principled   analysis is that people often give reasons for their moral judgments that  just can’t be right. For example, Marc Hauser of Harvard University and colleagues   presented subjects with a number of variations of moral dilemmas,  including the famous trolley problem (discussed in chapter 5) in which a  runaway trolley is going to kill five people unless it is diverted or stopped.

In  these scenarios, diverting or stopping the trolley will cause the death of one  person who otherwise would not be harmed. For example, in one scenario,  the only way to stop the trolley is to pull a lever that drops someone onto  the track, slowing the moving trolley. In another, pulling the lever diverts the  trolley to another track … with someone on it.
It’s possible to determine what people think is morally relevant by comparing   scenarios like these. Can people explain these judgments? In one set  of studies, subjects were given two different variants of the trolley problems  and, in cases in which they gave different answers-saying it’s OK to kill one to save five in one case but not OK in another-they were asked to provide   a justification for why. The researchers used a very loose criterion: They  counted a justification as "sufficient" if subjects were simply able to indicate  a fact that differed between the two scenarios and were able to imply that  this difference accounted for the differences in their judgment. Even with  this loose standard, for some pairs of scenarios for which people gave different   judgments, less than a third of participants were able to meet it.5

To read more,  buy the book Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind *by  (Robert Kurzban)

30% of students in sex work have debts, compared to 18% of the rest of the student population. Only 50% of sex workers get financial help from relatives, compared to 65%. Most important motive : "higher hourly wage", followed by "financial emergency", "search for adventure", "enjoying sex" in equal percentages. Experts from an agency advising prostitutes said "illusions, dream of easy quick money, desire for physical closeness and sexual curiosity".  One female student said: money is always an object, or else a woman has no need to use a whore house to to act out her sexuality. They earn between 50 and 300 Euro per day.

Surprisingly, men and women work in equal percentage in the sex industry. Only 49% are heterosexual (vs. 85% of comparison group), 33% homosexual (vs. 5.3%), 37.8% bisexual (vs. 8.8% in comparison group).

Human Stupidity Analysis

We at human-stupidity.com wish there was information about gender distribution in sexual orientation. It seems to us that heterosexual male sex workers would have restricted earning opportunities. We are surprised about the openness to prostitution and sex work, compared to the main stream media hysteria, especially in the United States (Feminist arguments against prostitution debunked)

Comparisons to attitudes the United States, Brazil, etc. would be very interesting (legal prohibitions related to prostitituion would hamper such studies) It also does not seem that these students are "trafficked" "victims" that need to be saved from their own action by feminists, justice system or political correctness police.

No major character differences could be found between sex working and other students in terms of openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness. In Berlin, 40% of students showed curiosity, in Paris 40% of students valued sex workers. 60% of sex workers cited problems like stigmatization, sexually transmitted diseases, and problems with their partners.

Sources: Der Tagesspiegel  Welt Online Hamburger Abendblatt

Here is a playlist of the entire Rushton-Graves discussion about Race and IQ. Interesting summary of facing off the ideological opponents to Rushton’s theory. See all the videos in one piece here.http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=DC0F78B62A560851

Accidentally, one video got in there from another discussion. I left it in, because it actually contributes to the discussion and is a refreshing variation. Rushton mentioned the temperament differences that make racial peace and acceptance difficult. I focussed too much on IQ. He explained that demands of cold winter required special planning, a new strategy that was not required before leaving Africa. The worst winters were in Africa

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a best-selling 2002 book by Steven Pinker arguing against tabula rasa models of the social sciences. Pinker argues that human behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations. The book was nominated for the 2003 Aventis Prizes and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. (wikipedia)

This tabula-rasa/blank-slate theory is responsible for most serious mistakes in social theories and public policies of the last century in fields like education, discrimination, gender relations. It also is related to rejection of inheritance based evolutionary theory. All this is very central to Human-Stupidity: how can a ridiculously false theory dogmatically dominate science and public policy for decades.

One simple example of always repeated conventional wisdom:

• “Children that are beaten by violent parents become violent adults”. There usually is no test for the alternative  hypothesis that this has nothing to do with genetics, but that these children could have genetically inherited violent traits from their parents.

Steven Pinker: Chalking it up to the blank slate

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

See also real important readings Evolutionary Psychology Primer & Reading List Leda Cosmides & John Tooby Evolutionary Psychology: Evolutionary Theory, Paleoanthropology, Adaptationism Evolutionary Psychology Primer & Reading List | Human-Stupidity. The Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television

Some more entertainment

Steven Pinker – The Language of Swearing (1/2)

In this Video, the great Steven Pinker how and why we convey innuendos instead of overt clear language.  Why do we use veiled hidden messages behind our words. The topic is  clarified with nice enlightening drawings by rsa-animate. Must see!

I leave it to the watcher, what this has to do with our favorite topics like dishonesty, unconsciousness,hypocrisy …

an evolutionary perspective [...] helps us understand why sexual transgressions by successful males, as well as the seemingly irrational levels of moral outrage at those transgressions, are both "natural," regardless of whether you personally feel that either is intrinsically good or bad.

Finally an intelligent comment about the moral condemnation hysteria of Tiger Woods.  Evolutionary Theory by Kurzban and deScioli

Men fantasize about novel women. Rich powerful man can actually get them

Tiger is a man with immense wealth and social status. Throughout history, men with wealth and status have tended to trade it for access to multiple mates. Evolutionary historian Laura Betzig has documented this pattern in modern societies and throughout history, as in the abundant cases of Roman emperors, Indian maharajahs, Arabian sheiks, and Chinese mandarins. Bhupinder Singh, the wealthy and powerful Seventh Maharajah of the state of Patiala, for example, had 350 wives, and he by no means held the record. European and North American states tend to be officially monogamous, but of course they are unofficially polygamous as well. Rock stars, famous athletes, politicians and even television evangelists are reliable sources of public outrage, which fires up every time we learn about their frequently overactive private lives.[...]

Kinsey found that the typical male masturbated with some frequency, during such activities men often fantasize about novel women. What if the man was sufficiently attractive that those fantasy women were actually ready, willing, and eager to turn desire into reality? The average heterosexual man would, under those circumstances, perhaps act like the average homosexual man (who is unconstrained by a more selective target audience), or like the average rock superstar: he would take hundreds of partners.

Psychology Today. December, 2009. Kenrick, D. T. “In "Defense" of Tiger Woods, AND of his critics." [link]

Moral outrage keeps others in check. So powerful men don’t monopolize too many women

Rob Kurzban and Peter DeScioli argue that moral reactions are not so much about checking our own selfish tendencies, as they are about keeping other people in line. [...]  we are rather good at forgiving ourselves a few transgressions. But we have a much lower threshold for turning on the moral outrage when we see someone else [...] Our emotional brains want to hold powerful individuals to a "higher standard" of behavior because, in ancestral times, it would have been in our selfish interests to keep our more successful fellows from drinking too freely from the limited common pool of mating opportunities. And in modern societies, where some people acquire immense amounts of wealth and power, monogamy can still reduce intra-male competition. 

So, an evolutionary perspective [...] helps us understand why sexual transgressions by successful males, as well as the seemingly irrational levels of moral outrage at those transgressions, are both "natural," regardless of whether you personally feel that either is intrinsically good or bad.

All quotes from
Psychology Today. December, 2009. Kenrick, D. T. “In "Defense" of Tiger Woods, AND of his critics." [link]

Video Robert Kurzban explains why everyone (else) is a hypocrite 

Why do we feel a compulsion to meddle in other peoples freedom to form whatever form of marriage or sexual relationship they might want to engage in?

Many women would rather be the second (or fifth) wife of an attractive, rich, powerful man like  Tiger Woods or Brad Pitt, then the first  and only wife of boring, fat, jobless, broke alcoholic Joe Bloke in a Detroit ghetto.  Even just being Tiger’s mistress is much more exciting then Joe Bloke. Why does our law restrict the liberty of these women, and of Tiger Woods?

Repression of other people’s sexuality is in the reproductive interest  of older married women, of unattractive men. Even vor the successful alpha male it is advantagous to repress sexuality in others,  while hypocritically pursuing his own promiscuous sexuality (remember Eliot Spitzer?). 

In this post we show that evolutionary theory suggests evolution has created mental modules in our brains to repress sexuality in others,  The gut feelings caused by these modules get rationalized into theories that give rise to repressive legislation.

Polygyny in birds

When good males are scarce, a female bird may prefer to become the second mate of a higher quality male with a bigger territory.

Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind by Robert Kurzban $27.95 0691146748 (all quotes are from Kurzban’s book. This book is a must-read to really understand this topic here)

mating pattern of certain bird species illustrates what’s known as the "polygyny threshold model," which has to do with how female birds choose a mate in certain complex environments. [...] Is it better to be the only mate of a poorer male or share a better one? I [a female bird]  can either nest with one of the remaining single – but lower quality- males, or I can nest with a [better high quality] male who is already paired, becoming the second female on his [bigger and better] patch. [...] When the payoff to being the second female on a patch is greater then the payoff to being the only mate of an inferior male, there will be polygyny. (Kurzban, pg. 208)

Morality for the birds?

To better understand how evolution could have formed modules for anti-polygyny morality, Kurzban analyzes a hypothetical bird population where moral rules prohibit polygyny.  He asks

Which birds stand to gain reproductive advantage when polygyny is prohibited?

1. "Clearly, female birds already paired with the best male mates will do better. Their mates won’t be able to acquire secondary females whose offspring would compete for the man’s resources." (Kurzban, p 209). Women married with good males have reasons to be feminists. Hillary Clinton only loses if hubby Bill gets entangled with interns. In contrast, Monica Lewinsky probably would have fared very well as Bill Clinton’s second or even fifth wife.
2. "There’s a natural alliance between monogamously mated females and low quality males because they both gain by enforced monogamy". "low-quality males benefit, since they now might get mates who would otherwise wind up as secondary mates of high-quality males" (Kurzban, p.) In a polygynous animal, primate, or human societies, many low-quality get no wives and no offspring at all. "Low quality males would have a deep, abiding, even crucial interest in rules that force everyone into monogamy" (Kurzban, p 213). Remember, evolution selected for mental modules that gave us reproductive advantage in the EEA, in small groups of hunter-gatherers. It seems that for low quality males, monogamy is the only chance to get a wife, rear  offspring and thus have reproductive success!  Low quality males that successfully prevent the high quality males from monopolizing multiple females would have considerably more offspring then tolerant open minded men who would remain empty handed while the high quality males would get all the females.
3. Almost all males "benefit from all other males being monogamous, even if they themselves are not [monogamous]? [...] "it’s best to constrain others’ sexual behavior. We’re all in favor of moral rule that prevent others from doing things that harm our own interests, but it is to our advantage to not obey our own rule. 
4. High quality alpha males can profit from imposing monogamy  on other males.  Powerful males have a better chance to remain unpunished if they violate these rules (at least in birds with no feminist dominated court system)
5. The losers of polygyny prohibition are un-paired females who have to settle for a lower quality male (‘a loser’)  because they are deprived of the freedom to choose to be wife #2 of a high quality male (with better genes, bigger territory, and more resources). 
6. The other losers  of enforced monogamy are the "cads" the sexy good looking promiscuous players. They are attractive to women for having good genes, but they can’t win the battle over who brings the most worms. "Without promiscuity, sexy males can’t make the most of what they’ve got." (Kurzban, p. 211). 
7. "Dads, however, win if the sexy males can’t be promiscuous. (They also benefit from keeping their females at home, rather than searching for the good-gene cads)"  (p 211) "Dads" are mated male birds that invest in their family and bring home worms for their kids.

We have an "interfere in other people’s private sex life" mental module.

"Humans are extremely social, and our survival and reproduction are determined in large part by how well we navigate the social world. Given this, it’s reasonable to expect that our minds are designed to compete fiercely-if not subtly- for the benefits in the social world: the best mates, the best friends, membership in the best groups, and so on. The outcomes of these competitions would have had massive effects on reproductive success over the course of human evolution."

So birds, mammals, and humans that increase their reproductive success by restricting other people’s sexual access will out-compete the democratic, personal-liberty-respecting tolerant liberal individuals.

We will post more about Kurzban’s theory of the modular mind, and the evolutionary advantages of internal inconsistency, self-deception, hypocrisy to explain this further. But to get a deep understanding one probably needs to read evolutionary literature

• Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind by Robert Kurzban $27.95 0691146748 |Amazon paperback or kindle version 

Modern birth control, social support, DNA tests render old moralistic modules unnecessary

Of course, nowadays Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, even attorney general Spitzer can easily afford 4 wives with 15 kids. Neither Elin nor Hillary even noticed the infidelity, much less suffered any serious disadvantages.  But, our brain modules, formed in the EEA to condemn other people’s private behavior, behavior that victimizes nobody, remain strong. Even the most powerful man on earth (the US president) is being prevented by strong moral rules to have a second wife or concubines.

Additionally, the availability of birth control, abortion, and DNA paternity tests, and government handouts to the poor, make most old sex laws unnecessary. Virginity is no more the only way to make sure that the offspring is really the husband’s.