The Home Place, Red Rock, East Chatham NY

Clark Road looking west, May 8, 2008

This is my old home place, the farm I grew up on, the place I left to begin these winter journeys to the southwest.

Orchard Lot camp, June 4, 2009

Red Rock is a rural hamlet near Chatham in Columbia County, New York.

I used to camp in a few locations on what little I had left of the family farm
- In the driveway by the house
- Across the road where the barn once stood
- On the 20 acre piece off Less Traveled Road
Now, with the kind support of the friends who now own the place, I camp across the road where the barn once stood.
Verizon cell phone service - Terrible, barely usable with an amplifier
Verizon EVDO service - Terrible, barely usable with an amplifier
Find other references to Home Place
List the nights I've camped here
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Nights I've camped 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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