Thursday, June 18, 2009 - Pittsfield MA

Fluff in the Strawberry Patch, Home Farm, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, May 30, 2009

It's wild strawberry season

This year promises to be a good one for wild strawberries. Plant life not adversely affected by the extraordinary rains we've had the last few days, like the wild strawberries in my field, is growing vigorously.

I think this darned leak is finally sealed?

We had another downpour last night - there were no leaks!. You can read about my long struggle to find and seal these two leaks at A Tale of Two Leaks.

Night camp

Wal-Mart Supercenter in Pittsfield MA

Wal-Mart Store #2228, 555 Hubbard Ave./Suite 12, Pittsfield, MA 01201 - (413) 442-1971

Good level parking lot
Verizon cell phone service is good
Verizon EVDO Broadband service is good
Find other Wal-Marts in the area
Check the weather here

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.

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