Friday, December 31, 2010 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
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Snow Goose, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 4, 2010
Only twenty thousand pictures to sort
Ha! I was so busy playing with the new Canon EOS 7D 18 MP CMOS Digital SLR Camera with 3-inch LCD and 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM Standard Zoom Lens I bought from Amazon last January I didn't take the time to organize the thousands of pictures I was taking. Big mistake.
I was staying at the Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park and spent at lot of time at the nearby Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge experimenting and practicing panning on birds in flight in High Speed Continuous mode to see if I could get some decent shots of birds in flight. I was doing this hand held and trying to teach my body to swing smoothly enough to get pictures that were reasonably sharp. That takes some practice and at 8 shots a second adds up to a lot of pictures.
At the time I didn't do much more than give them a quick look to see what I was getting - often nothing worth keeping - before moving on to the next shoot. I didn't even take the time to delete the obvious clunkers.
So here I sit, throwing away tons of junk and stumbling on a few keepers like this one.
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.