When is a belief system a Mental Disorder?

Are you pale yourself, perhaps of Northern European ancestry? Pale skin connotes an ethnicity close to your own, thus reinforcing your own genetics in your offspring by crossing your genes with similar genes.Or are you of more darker skin? Latin perhaps, or even African? Pale skin would indicate "exotic" genes which you may be attracted to perhaps to offset a historically small gene pool in your ancestors.Or, you're just all up into pale chicks. I've never said that wasn't possible. It might very well be that there's no organic basis for this particular preference.But to suggest that there's no organic basis for any preference isn't something that you can support in light of the evidence.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 02-22-2006 04:27 PM

I guess I'm curious. Is it that you're ignorant of the large numbers of studies that, to me, seem to show exactly this; or is it that you reject them all off-hand for one reason or another?Mate choice is not statistically random. The way people choose mats statistically correlates with certain reproductive advantages that they don't tend to be aware of. I don't find these facts disputable and the conclusion from them is obvious. Where am I going wrong? If you're refering to theories that evolution controls our minds, you're right - nobody is advancing such a theory, either here or in the scientific community.But, hey, you know. Whatever. Human beings, like everything else, are the product of 3 billion years of evolution - but we're the one single species whose behavior is absolutly unaffected by that. Sure. That's completely reasonable, isn't it? People travel for many reasons. Probably none of them are mate choice. But mating with a member of the group does generally include one into the group. That's the oldest story in the world. How common? 1 in 5? 1 in 20? And what's a "race", exactly? I'm italian and my wife is swedish. Are we interracial? To some, we are.Also, I really appreciated the inference that anybody that disagrees with your position has a mental disorder. That's a technique first popularized by anti-semite conservative talk-show host Michael Savage, by the way. Maybe the reason nobody takes your evo-psych threads seriosuly, or cares to do your homework for you, is because you predicate your entire line of argumentation on an enormous ad-hominem: "my opponents must be mentally insane."

And what's the alternative explanation? If likes and dislikes were random, people wouldn't largely have the same likes and dislikes.Or did you think that they didn't? That people's preferences were randomly distributed? The fact that advertising works proves you wrong. If people's preferences weren't almost entirely predictable corporations would be spending millions every month to try to sell us something they think we'll like.

Ok. How is beauty detected? Is beauty a wave or a particle?

I don't see anything here that I can't reply to in the other thread. Hopefully that's fine.

It's reality that determines our perceptions, not the other way around.

Dreamed up? Sorry, Faith, what I told you was fact:1) It's a fact that starvation was an immediate possibility for all humans right up to the development of industrial society (and actually, through most of the history of those societies.)2) It's a fact that a person who's last meal was a fatty carbo-loaded food source will evade the harmful effects of starvation much longer than someone who's last meal was a salad. (Not much energy or fat in lettuce.)3) It's a fact that, in a situation of sudden famine, the person whose innate food preferences led them to eat fatty carbo-loaded foods will outlast the person whose innate food preferences led them to eat nothing more substantial than a salad. (Even if it was all the salad they could eat. Lettuce is mostly water.)4) It's a fact, thus, that your body's preference for the foods you labeled "bad" represents, in fact, an adaptation to the reality of food avaliability for the vast majority of human history.You're free to believe that this preference is a part of God's design for humanity; the evidence supports the idea that this represents an adaptation to environment via evolution. But the idea that this preference has nothing at all to do with our environment and genetics, or that this explanation is just "evo type imagination" is absolutely false. It's completely consistent with YEC, too; you've just simply chosen to reject it out of hand because an evolutionist is telling it to you. Had a creationist said "humans are this way as part of God's plan to deal with starvation" you would have said "oh, yes, how totally reasonable."

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make her drink. You've got a real problem seeing the really obvious connections, don't you?Did you really think a genetic basis for weight gain was off-topic in a discussion about whether or not our food preferences constitute an adaptation to environment?

Pablo Picasso was the painter. Although I think you guys are a bit off-base; Picasso's work explored composition, not symmetry. His famous abstract portraits of women were experiments in evoking the same kind of response people have to conventional portraiture without actually painting a portrait; Picasso was attempting to explore how response to art could be divorced from the response to the subject matter of the art. (For instance, if you see a still life of a bowl of oranges and you like it, is it because the painting is a good painting, or because oranges are delicious?)One of the watershed moments in my life was a tour of the Picasso museum in Barcelona and seeing Picasso's early mastery of entirely conventional portraiture and impressionism. I saw for the first time that Picasso wasn't just some pretentious twit who scribbled on a canvas and conned art snobs into thinking he was hot shit; he first mastered the technical art of traditional painting and then, like some kind of artist-scientist, began to explore exactly how art evokes, and what it evokes, apart from the subject matter itself.