Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
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Late Snack, Sandhill Crane, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 4, 2010
Catching up with my posts
Now that I'm caught up here I'm going to try to catch up with the posts I let slide while I was boondocking over at Leasburg Dam State Park, Radium Springs NM without enough power to comfortably keep the laptop running. If you want to follow along, start with the December 6th post. You'll find some info in those posts about my experiences with winter boondocking.
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.