Thursday, January 10, 2008 - Alpine TX
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Oil field supply companies have lots of new tanks and equipment in stock. Trucks are carrying oversize loads of fancy equipment about. The t(h)reat of $100.00 per barrel oil seems to have lit the entrepreneurial fires in these parts.
Today's journey
US 67 from San Angelo, Texas, Texas to Alpine, Texas.
Night camp
Pecan Grove RV Park, Alpine TX
Pecan Grove RV Park, Alpine TX
- This is a basic, small Mom & Pop RV Park with full hookups and a laundry.
- Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are available here but I don't remember how strong the signal is.
- Find other references to Pecan Grove
- List the nights I've camped here
- Get a Google map and Street View of the park
- Check the weather
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.