Taking human culture to universe.

On 7 Jun 2006 10:52:07 -0700, "Immortalist"
wrote:


neo wrote:
Suppose mankind discovered new ways of propulsion to reach stars in few
hours.

I can imagine a spaceship full of muslim terrorists reading quran with
bombs, christians gays, lesbians having same sex, israelies fighting
with palestines, hindus giving bribes to each others, people in one
compartment declaring independance, rapes, murders, thefts, abuse etc.

Want to be captain of this spaceship?

It appears that you are pointing out only the negative things that
human nature brings about, here are some more;

...if people were somehow raised from birth in an environment devoid of
most cultural influence, they would construct basic elements of human
social life ab initio. In short time new elements of language would be
invented and their culture enriched. Robin Fox, an anthropologist and
pioneer in human sociobiology, has expressed this hypothesis in its
strongest possible terms. Suppose, he conjectured, that we performed
the cruel experiment linked in legend to the Pharaoh Psammetichus and
King James IV of Scotland, who were said to have reared children by
remote control, in total social isolation from their elders. Would the
children learn to speak to one another?

I do not doubt that they could speak and that, theoretically, given
time, they or their offspring would invent and develop a language
despite their never having been taught one. Furthermore, this language,
although totally different from any known to us, would be analyzable to
linguists on the same basis as other languages and translatable into
all known languages. But I would push this further. If our new Adam and
Eve could survive and breed - still in total isolation from any
cultural influences - then eventually they would produce a society
which would have laws about property, rules about incest and marriage,
customs of taboo and avoidance, methods of settling disputes with a
minimum of bloodshed, beliefs about the supernatural and practices
relating to it, a system of social status and methods of indicating it,
initiation ceremonies for young men, courtship practices including the
adornment of females, systems of symbolic body adornment generally,
certain activities and associations set aside for men from which women
were excluded, gambling of some kind, a tool- and weapon-making
industry, myths and legends, dancing, adultery, and various doses of
homicide, suicide, homosexuality, schizophrenia, psychosis and
neuroses, and various practitioners to take advantage of or cure these,
depending on how they are viewed.

In 1945 the American anthropologist George P. Murdock listed the
following characteristics that have been recorded in every culture
known to history and ethnography:

Age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness
training, community organization, cooking, cooperative labor,
cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of
labor, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics,
ethnobotany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire making,
folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift giving,
government, greetings, hair styles, hospitality, housing, hygiene,
incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship
nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage,
mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names,
population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights,
propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual,
residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status
differentiation, surgery, tool making, trade, visiting, weaving, and
weather control.

Sub Saharan Negroes don't count.

Few of these unifying properties can be interpreted as the inevitable
outcome of either advanced social life or high intelligence. It is easy
to imagine nonhuman societies whose members are even more intelligent
and complexly organized than ourselves, yet lack a majority of the
qualities just listed. Consider the possibilities inherent in the
insect societies. The sterile workers are already more cooperative and
altruistic than people and they have a more pronounced tendency toward
caste systems and division of labor. If ants were to be endowed in
addition with rationalizing brains equal to our own, they could be our
peers. Their societies would display the following peculiarities:

Age-grading, antennal rites, body licking, calendar, cannibalism, caste
determination, caste laws, colony-foundation rules, colony
organization, cleanliness training, communal nurseries, cooperative
labor, cosmology, courtship, division of labor, drone control,
education, eschatology, ethics, etiquette, euthanasia, fire making,
food taboos, gift giving, government, greetings, grooming rituals,
hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, language, larval care,
law, medicine, metamorphosis rites, mutual regurgitation, nursing
castes, nuptial flights, nutrient eggs, population policy, queen
obeisance, residence rules, sex determination, soldier castes,
sisterhoods, status differentiation, sterile workers, surgery, symbiont
care, tool making, trade, visiting, weather control,

and still other activities so alien as to make mere description by our
language difficult. If in addition they were programmed to eliminate
strife between colonies and to conserve the natural environment they
would have greater staying power than people, and in a broad sense
theirs would be the higher morality.

From On Human Nature by Edward O Wilson
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/
--

Christopher