Monday, January 3, 2011 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
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Bird & Birders, Sunset, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 4, 2010
There's the infamous goose
This picture will give you an idea of the scene at the roosting ponds along the highway through the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge a few miles south of San Antonio NM. This picture was taken about a minute after the Snow Goose series I pulled the picture from for the posts on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Birders gather here to watch the Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese coming to roost at sunset and again in the morning to watch them wake up and take off for their feeding grounds at sunrise.
Night camp
Site 8 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
- This is a spacious 65 site campground with most sites offering full hookups.
- Locate LoW-HI RV Ranch on my Night Camps map
- Verizon cell phone - strong signal
- Verizon Broadband - strong signal but often slow
- Check the weather in Deming NM
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.