Thursday, May 13, 2010 - Giant City State Park, Makanda IL
< previous day | archives | next day >
Another broken wing trick, Killdeer, Site 4, Freeman Community Club RV Park, Freeman MO, May 11, 2010
Night camp
Site 82 - Giant City State Park, Makanda IL
- Giant City State Park is a large older park located off US 51 mid way between Carbondale and Anna IL.
- This heavily wooded park has a large campground and many campsites with 30 AMP electric. Water and a dump station are available but not at the sites. Fee is $20.00 per night - no discounts.
- There is good Verizon cell phone and EVDO service
- Find Giant City State Park on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Nights I've camped 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.