We all evolve because our peers and our forerunners have given us advice, or demonstrated by example, on how we should proceed.
We learn through several mediums.
1) By example; someone demonstrates how we should proceed and we learn from that example.
2) Positive exploration; someone discovers a new way to do something, and passes that information on to the rest of us.
3) Negative exploration; someone discovers a way of not doing something, and we learn from their mistake.
I imagine that idiot who was chucking rocks at the mammoth, and got trampled to death, demonstrated to the others how not to take down a mammoth.
I imagine that the guy that used a javelin to bring down the mammoth encouraged others to do the same.
I imagine those who brought down the mammoth with their javelins passed on this fact to their peers and their offspring.
See how we learn.
Of course, there are exceptions, such as those who make the same mistakes over and over again, and are unable to comprehend that they continually fail. As John Cleese said recently, you have to be reasonably intelligent to know you are stupid, because there is a level of stupidity where they are so stupid that they cannot conceive that they are stupid. In other words, they are too stupid to know that they are stupid.
Originally Posted by OlegL
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), sloppy, filthy, undereducated, etc. We really don't want those negatives associated with us. By denigrating, we are saying, "I recognize this person's shortcomings, so do NOT pin them on me- I know better; that's not me..." Most of these are ultimately based in some sort of survival of the group nature' overweight=unhealthy, filthy=spreads disease, undereducated=prone to mistakes, etc.
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