Saturday, January 15, 2011 - Percha Dam State Park, Arrey NM
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Rio Grande River, Percha Dam State Park, Arrey NM, March 26, 2009
Never a duh! moment
Back on January 9th I started a project to update the bones of this website. There were lots of things bugging me, the big one being poor navigation. Stuff accumulates and there are now about 1,500 pages here on lots of unrelated topics. It's a mess. I've tried several navigation schemes over the years and none of them pleased me. Determined to do something about it I set out to tune up some underlying structural issues while thinking about the navigation mess.
In the process I bumped up against the HTML <strong> tag which hadn't been working for a long time and I wanted it back. It is widely used around this site but you would never know it. I made a few half hearted attempts to figure out what went awry in the past but now I wanted it fixed, dammit. I'm a self taught tinker in this HTML and CSS world and I assumed I had tinkered with something in the CSS files that was suppressing it but I couldn't figure out what I might have done.
By yesterday I had had enough. I was going to fix this thing once and for all and I spent most of the day trying.
I went to bed last night no closer to an answer than when I started. Frustrated, I was. This morning I went at it again, this time in a very systematic way and finally isolated the problem in a CSS file. For some reason way back in the dim past in some experiment I had added "font-weight: lighter;" to the body element and then forgot to take it back out. Well DUH!
Night camp
Site 23 - Percha Dam State Park, Arrey NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - good signal
- Go to the Percha Dam State Park website
- Locate Percha Dam State Park on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather in Arrey 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.