Friday, December 11, 2009 - Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM

Sunrise, Site 42, Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM, December 11, 2009

Ah! to awaken to a gorgeous sunrise, the sweet smell of crude on the breeze, the gentle sound of a make-or-break pipeline pumping engine thump...thump....thump thump......thumping in the background - 'tis comfort food to the fulltimer rolling into a peak oil future.

Night camp

Site 42 - Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM

Verizon cell phone service - Access is via Extended Network, roaming
No Verizon EVDO service - access is via the Extended Network and service varies with many drop-outs.
See a list of the nights I've camped at Brantley Lake State Park
Locate Brantley Lake State Park on my Night Camps map
Go to Brantley Lake State Park website
Locate services on my Resources map
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.

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