Thursday, July 23, 2009 - Red Rock, East Chatham NY
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LD's kitchen and a peek aft into my study, July 19, 2009
Today I started a project to reduce the weight and intrusiveness of the bed in my study
Today I shed quite a few pounds from this Lazy Daze' load and opened up my study area considerably. I didn't get good picture of the study but I think you can get a sense of how the bed intrudes into the study. A year or so back I replaced the old collapsing convertible sofa cushion with a twin mattress. This is a comfortable arrangement but is a bit large for the space and heavy to boot. Today I tossed it out along with the underlying sofa pullout mechanism that is designed to convert the sofa to a double bed. I salvaged the 4 inch foam from the overcab bed and added 4 inches of memory foam topper. I now have a comfortable 30 inch wide bed and a much larger study. Nice.
Night camp
On my property off Less Traveled Road - The Home Place, Red Rock, East Chatham NY
- I used to camp in a few locations on what little I had left of the family farm
- In the driveway by the house
- Across the road where the barn once stood
- On the 20 acre piece off Less Traveled Road
- Now, with the kind support of the friends who now own the place, I camp across the road where the barn once stood.
- Verizon cell phone service - Terrible, barely usable with an amplifier
- Verizon EVDO service - Terrible, barely usable with an amplifier
- Find other references to Home Place
- List the nights I've camped here
- 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.