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Ben Finn's avatar

Interesting article. Re this:"when values are encoded in many stories, histories, rituals, etc., a change to any one of them needn’t much change overall behavior. So the genotype can drift until it is near a one-step change to a better phenotype. This allows culture to evolve more incrementally, and avoid local maxima."

But if there's a single change to a better phenotype - i.e. some alteration to one moral story, say, which should improve the behaviour of those who follow it - won't the effect get diluted, ignored or even reverted precisely because of all the other stories, rituals etc. that don't incorporate the same change?

(If I misunderstood, an example of what you mean might help.)

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jimpliciter's avatar

I've spoken to a few 'died in the wool' Pentecostal types (out of curiosity) and they agree that the Bible is a well spring of useful existential, social, moral and valuative information (wheat), but they're just as adamant regarding the chaff. The crucial difference is that Christians are typically hard-balled literalists regarding the Truth of the Bible and Peterson isn't. He bypasses the chaff and claims that the wheat is mired in metaphor, allegory, symbolism and archetype. The burning question I have is : why was it that- historically- the only way to distribute this 'all important information' was to deep fry it in obfuscated abstraction (metaphor, allegory, symbolism, archetype, etc.), but now after millennia (Peterson's) meticulous, psychoanalytic, hermetical exegesis, we are able to imbibe the 'all important advice' sans the chaff- explicitly? As Robin mentions, there's little evidence for any academic support for that idea. He seems to be very much on his own and from the few Pentecostal types I know they don't really agree. The chaff and wheat are equally true for the Christian, but for Peterson the chaff is ultimately a redundant means to the wheat.

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