May 06, 2008
< previous day | archives | next day >
Road conditions across New York's southern tier
The Southern Tier "is a geographical term that refers to the counties of New York State west of the Catskill Mountains along the northern border of Pennsylvania."
It's been a while since I've traveled across the southern tier and nnnow I remember wwhy - the roads are in terrible condition with bone jarring pavement breaks and potholes galore. Let's see how long I can remember this time not to choose this route again. I'm getting tttired of ccclosing dddrawers and pppicking stuff off the fffloor and rrrighting stuff in the cccabinetsss.
Night camp:
Wal-Mart parking lot, Painted Post, New York
Genetic Determinism and Human Nature
The "implication" that seems to worry people the most is so-called genetic determinism - the notion that if human nature was shaped by evolution, then it's fixed and we're simply stuck with it; there's nothing we can do about it. We can never change the world to be the way we want; we can never institute fairer societies - policy-making and politics are pointless.
Now, that's a complete misunderstanding. It doesn't distinguish between human nature - our evolved psychology - and the behavior that results from it. Certainly, human nature is fixed. It's universal and unchanging, common to every baby that's born, down through the history of our species.But human behavior, which is generated by that nature, is endlessly variable and diverse. After all, fixed rules can give rise to an inexhaustible range of outcomes. Natural selection equipped us with the fixed rules - the rules that constitute our human nature. And it designed those rules to generate behavior that's sensitive to the environment. So the answer to genetic determinism is simple. If you want to change behavior, just change the environment.