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Comment by Radim | Hacker News Reader

> outside of the way things change naturally on their own.

"Naturally on their own", you say?

It sounds like you consider humans outside of forces of nature, outside of evolution.

Are you a theist perhaps?

I'm trying to understand your position, because to me humans and human relationships and human societies and human actions seem (obviously) a part of nature. They're complex systems, yes, but there's nothing inorganic or unnatural or magical about them. The same rules of biology and physics apply as everywhere else.

And yes, coercing others to capture more resources for self seems a prototypical example of a (co-)evolutionary arms race.

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I feel like I'm debating someone who is intentionally acting obtuse. I think you know what I'm saying and understand perfectly well what my position is here. Trying to shoehorn religion (something I'm sure you abhore) into this says a lot about the disingenuous nature of your motivation in this discussion. This would be more fruitful if you would just be candid with your own opinions instead affecting a passive aggressive attitude.

Let's agree to disagree.

I explained my position and explicitly said I'm trying to understand yours – claiming a textbook example of evolution is not evolution is just weird.

You come back with ad-hominems.

And then add new wrong assumptions into the mix – why should I abhore religion? You can do better.

If the original comment said 'it would not be language evolving [normally]...'

As opposed to 'organically' would you still have an issue understanding?

Assume here that normal is a linguistic approximation to the mathematical idea of arithmetic mean. It could also be replaced with the word typically.

In this context, your notion of a top down demand that blue means red or vice versa, is not 'organic' evolution, it's guided. Closer to the dog than the wolf.

No, the original comment talks about people taking advantage of other people through "concerted, top-down effort to manipulate and coerce", calling that "outside of evolution".

I claim it is textbook evolution. An almost trivial observation.

Note that mine is not a moral judgement. I said nothing about whether I like such coercion or not, whether I think it benefits humanity in the long run or not, etc. Just that it's completely in line with natural evolution – not outside of it.

Typical, normal, organic… whatever you want to call it. Not necessarily desirable because such vocabulary is alien to evolutionary processes.

The only way you could call organisms taking advantage of other organisms to gain preferential access to resources "atypical", is if you consider humans outside of the natural world. Then statements like "top down" and "unnatural" would have substance.

I called that view theist (mystical may have been better), which decremental took strong umbrage to, for some reason. But again, a rather trivial observation IMO.

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