Is The GOP Monkeying With America?
by pessimist
Despite the rabid anti-science bent of the Republican party today, the rest of the world continues to research many things that religious-based conservatism refuses to allow or acknowledge. One of these is the biological motivations for human behaviors.
The genetic code of humans and chimps are 96% identical, but there are still significant differences between the two species, such as chimps being immune to most fatal human diseases.
I'm not going to address the battle over evolution in this post, nor will I here take up the cause of natural selection over 'intelligent' design.
Instead, I'm proposing that chimps can assist with understanding Republican conservative behavior.
Many conservatives like to spout off about certain topics as if they are prancing about in the wild without a care for anyone or anything. This study tends to support the concept that this is in fact a trait of conservatives by presenting certain behaviors of chimps under certain conditions that reflect what we progressives know about conservatives:
Chimps fall down on friendship
Humanlike attributes shown by chimps include tool use and maybe rudimentary language skills, but this study suggests altruism is not among them. Captive chimpanzees fail to help others in their social group, even when it causes no inconvenience, a behavioural study in Nature journal has found.The chimps were presented with two reward options:
* One option allowed a chimp only to serve itself with food.
* The other secured the same reward, but also delivered food to another chimpanzee in an enclosure next door.
Dr Silk's team found the 29 chimps tested in the study were no more likely to pick the second option than the first, even though it allowed them to do a "good deed" at no cost to themselves. The result was surprising because the chimps had been living together in the same group for 15 years. They were not related, but might have been expected to be very close.
Food sharing has been demonstrated in groups of wild chimpanzees. So the Nature study raises questions about how this behaviour arises. Other researchers suggest that the result could be down to the unnatural situation or to differences in behaviour brought on by captivity.
Conservatives display feelings that can be attributed to being trapped - 'having' to abide 'foreign' social groups, or being 'forced' to accept certain behaviors in others that they abhor and cannot avoid. Is it any wonder that political conservatives are much more likely to be NRA members, or hold barely-concealed Klan-like biases? It's in their genes!
Fear drives people to panic, and panic causes actions that might at other times seem extremely irrational. Who, for example, could explain the USA Patriot Act to someone from, say, the 1770s?
But fear not! Despite the many roadblocks put in place by the religious conservative Luddites who fear knowledge to the point of insanity (or of banning snakes and apples), modern science offers a clue as to why such a law exists in the Land of the Free:
Monkey brains explain nutty laws
American scholars have blamed the woes of the world on the primate in all of us. Lawmakers rushing into making hot-headed judgments lies at the heart of the problem, they say. The response to September 11 is a prime example of "Emote control" - tight security at airports is meant to save lives, but instead causes more people to drive rather than fly, and so causes more deaths.
Moderate levels of negative emotions warn the higher brain that its slower, more reasoned powers will be required. Intensifying fear or anger will soon take over though, kicking in the faster-responding primitive brain, as the paper's co-author Professor George Lowenstein explains: "One may realize the what the best course of action is but find one's self doing the opposite."Emotions are also more vulnerable to manipulation by marketers, since they are attuned to respond to novelty, and visual stimulus.
Think about the Republican political ads of just the Bu$hCo years. Remember DemocRATS? Remember the simplicity and flashiness? Remember how often the GOP resorted to a simplistic 'Flip-flop' mantra when countering John Kerry's proposals? Now you understand why the GOP campaign ads looked and sounded like they did - scared conservative minds can't process the more complex data that solving the problems of the nation today require.
Instead, simplistic sound bites are offered to assuage and manipulate the primate brain that seems to drive too many of our Wrong-Wing Wregulars, just to pick on a familiar group. How many times have they offered GOP sound bites as arguments in our comment threads without any presenting evidence to support their positions? There is a reason why they don't - they can't!
Now I'm no expert in human behavior, nor do I play one on television, but I do know that discussion about this danger-perception problem in conservatives is extremely necessary if any solution for it is going to be evolved. Calming their fears in order to promote higher-level thought in them is vital to the survival of us all. Let it begin here.
Just pretend that you are offering them food for thought while you feed yourself. After all, you aren't a chimp - are you?
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