Monday, November 17, 2008 - Winchester KY
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A fork in the road
From here in the middle of Kentucky I can head either directly west toward New Mexico or south toward more immediate warm weather.
I'm going to Demopolis
I must admit this cold snap is influencing my decision and I'm leaning toward heading south. It's cold. I'm going to Demopolis. I spent a delightful 3 weeks last December photographing the wildlife at Foscue Creek Park and watching barge traffic on the Tombigbee River.
Night camp
Wal-Mart parking lot in Winchester KY
- Darn. I'm writing this bullet point after the fact and I can't remember whether this Wal-Mart offers good boondocking or not.
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.