Tuesday, April 26, 2011 - Devil's Canyon Campground, Blanding UT
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Sandstone Plus, White Canyon, Fry Canyon UT, April 22, 2011
What is that I see?
Down there. In the crick bed. Amongst the wonderfully multicolored tumbled sandstone river rocks. Those harder, slicker, gray rocks. What are they? Here's my guess. Uranium. Well, uranium bearing rocks.
Toward the top of the colorful sandstone layers forming the buttes around here is a very distinct gray layer. You can even see it as bluish rings around the buttes on my Google Night Camps map - it's quite extensive. It seems to me these river rocks down here tumbled out of the eroding buttes above and that the gray ones came from the gray layer.
Sandstone Plus, White Canyon, Fry Canyon UT, April 22, 2011
Somewhere I read whilst at Capitol Reef a few days back that the gray layer visible there contains uranium. There are mines here - one I saw from the roadside was involved with the gray layer. There are uranium mines in this area. Ergo...
Night camp
Site 7 - Devil's Canyon Campground, Blanding UT
- Verizon cell phone and EVDO service - good signal
- Go to Devil's Canyon Campground website
- Locate Devil's Canyon Campground on my Night Camps 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.